SECTION TWO UNITED SCAPES

  

SECTION TWO

UNITED SCAPES  

 -2-1-  THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION war and peace and supply and demand

-2-2-  PAUL REVERE AND THE LIBERTY TREE  America in 1765. alternative view of the Founding revolutionaries

-2-3-   II22   finally getting vacations. 40 days on the road and an analysis of the highway system and why we have to think of hte future

-2-4-  NON PROFIT BANKING Bankrupting usurious banking

-2-5-  A NEW SQUARE DEAL   who were the Progressives and why do Liberals claim credit for the reforms that upgraded america

-2-6-  MARXISM IN AMERICA   Capitalism AND Communism are two failed euro-centric economic systems. The world needs somthing better

-2-7-  SOCIALISM IS FOR LOSERS  Greed Mockumentary

-2-8-  CONVERSATIONS WITH CONSERVATIVE CONSERVATIONISTS

-2-9-  LIBERTARIANS

-2-10-WHO ARE THE WHITE PEOPLE

-2-11-  THE INDEPENDENT MAJORITY PARTY

-2-12-  MARKET SOCIALISM    the inevitable market system

-2-13- TABOOS EXPOSED  Unionism

 -2-1-THE DAWN OF    

      CIVILIZATION  

"Try as they might to make the mass murder 

acceptable and patriotic, deep in our collective American hearts, we know war is wrong."

 

Nationally, Americans demand recreation areas, protected forests, estuaries and parks of all sorts; and walking trails locally. They appreciate being supplied with good facilities during their travelling adventures in this wonderfully expansive system of national and state parks in the United States. This notion would seem logical for a country that includes "The pursuit of happiness" in the preamble to its Constitution, its mission statement. Then why does 800 billion dollars go to The Pentagon every year, and only 3 billion goes to the national park service?                                 

          Apparently, making a fleet of eighty-MILLION-dollar fighter jets is much more important than anything nature has to offer. This is what the government is telling us with this lopsided budget. Why should taxes go to a park ranger explaining the difference between red squirrels and brown squirrels during a guided tour? How is THAT a priority?

What about the supply and demand in our economy that the Republicans are always whining and braying about? Our National Parks have a dearth of facilities and maintenance is spotty, but crowds continue to grow. There is a big demand for recreation from the people of America and enthralled visitors and vacationers from around the world, --- the supply part of supply and demand, you know.

Park expansion, safety of campers and visitors, and the preservation of ecological diversity has been subverted by corporations that profit from war, and by the army of corporate lobbyists in Washington. THE PEOPLE WANT PARKS NOT WAR.

2022 update. The current administration has created a fund for the National Parks but still won’t reduce the military.

The American people and visitors from around the world, are out there trying to have a grand vacation visiting the great places of America, only to find stinky bathrooms, traffic jams, and tour guides swamped with crowds. Not only are you creating recreation for today when land is purchased and preserved, but wild space for ever and ever.  Pondering all this, how does an upgraded 150-million-dollar fighter jet ever make sense?

          It makes sense, mon aci, because everyone has gotten fat off the government the last sixty years, and now they slap "my guns my god and my money…you keep the change", bumper stickers on their cars. These people not fully comprehending the markets and products that the government encouraged, created their prosperity. Markets as diverse as Dairy and Nuclear Energy.  The capitalists slipped America a roofie, 60 years ago, and have not stopped ravaging her. They can't believe that no one has stopped them, so they keep taking from her, rapidly poisoning our earth with their newest degradation called Fracking.

          Making weapons and selling weapons is profitable. Creating wars to destroy them, so they can make more, made these phony wars enormously profitable and Boomers are sitting pretty in their gated communities after using Millennials as cannon fodder since 2001.  Making weapons is a dirty income and many of todays tea baggers and Q=nons profited, and perhaps you are profiting also, with your investments, you liberal douchebag.

         Now that they’ve got their pensions and social security, the senior teahadists are quickly closing the barn door so no one else can share this government subsidized wealth, which they stole directly from our natural resources.  One entire generation destroyed more forests than any other generation, EVER, and profited wonderfully from the drastic reduction of prices with the ravaging of these resources, particulary our forests and wild lands. The cost of paper products was artificially cheap as a result.

Dear reader, if you invest, then divest of your poison stocks. It is time to think about all life on this earth that will be here the next million years. Invest Green best you can. Invest clean. As Derrick Jensen says, not the “bright green” the techies want, but the deep green of true earth stewardship. The Klondike Capitalism of the Green Movement needs to be regulated as little as possible.  Home grown in every way.

We agree with Conservatives on this one. Raw milk producers want regulations eased but Big Dairy is firmly in the driver's seat. People who sell il are of no particular  political party. Once people in the red states realize they’ve been railroaded by the big corporations, some heads are going to roll and a long battle lay ahead in many different places. The sterile poison seed of corporate farmers gets a pass, while small organic farmers have many regulatory hurdles to leap and certifications to achieve, in order to participate in the market. 

In Florida fresh eggs have to be sold with the wrning sign "Not for human consumption". It took some nasty ass Republican state legislator to come up with that law. Farm income should not be taxed for the first $25,000 of sales.

        War is good for the economy; it creates JOBS we were told our entire childhood. "World War 2 lifted us out of the depression", is another myth that has become reality. The truth was that the explosion of innovations during and after WW2, was actually possible because of all the scientific innovations that had been made in the 1930's. In radio, refrigeration, electricity, and many other areas of research that were directly involved in improving our daily lives.  Invention and innovation and knowledge had rapidly expanded in the Thirties and a real prosperity was emerging and lively cultures were booming again, in many cities, then WW2 disrupted everything.     

           Good times with positive momentum were on the way, as the world retooled itself after the Great Depression. Instead, we are told the Big War created prosperity, when all it really did was create devastation and misery. It stopped the artistic explosion that was happening in many countries such as Poland and stopped seminal inventions dead in their tracks in order to supply the war machine. It became all about war. People accept war as a human condition and “there’s nothing we can do.”

          Reducing our 800 billion dollar a year Pentagon budget would "make us weak" and "could wreck the economy" we are told in 2022, even still. America spends as much as the next ten countries combined on the military; how stupid do they think we are? There are stats that prove a dollar would go ten times further if it were to stay in the states and used in, let’s say, an infrastructure program. What would we prefer? One soldier in Afghanistan or 10 Road Rangers helping people stranded on the highways right here in the UNITED States. Maybe have more security at Interstate Rest Areas. Recycling roadside garbage. How many times did I stop on the beautiful Route 50 in Georgia to stretch and smoke and I'd look down the hill and it’s all washing machines and attic foam and clothes and cans of beer. What trash we are! Conservatives cut all the wrong government funding. 

        America needs an upgrade but it will take a reduction of the military budget. First. Then, it will take more than ten years to bleach the coral colony of corruption in the military supply chain.

 Do you truly believe were preserving American freedom by the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the CIA proxy wars in Central America, the 2 wars with Iraq, and the furthest away of all, the longest war in Afghanistan? War may help the Gross National Product and is lucrative for people with stocks in weapon manufacturing and oil companies, but it doesn’t work in real life anymore, unless you are getting a pension from your Weapon maker job. If your conscience doesn't propel you to divest and boycott companies that pollute our planet or create weapons of war, then wait till boycotts shut them down.

  Try as they might to make mass murder acceptable and patriotic, deep in our collective American hearts we know it’s wrong.   

 

The Greatest Generations antiquated notions of how everyone has their place, was put to the test and failed in the 60's.  The boomers saw this world filled with racism and sexism with our young hopeful eyes, and collectively our disgust level was so high, that things have changed in the last 50 years. Thank you to all who have stood up for equality, you are the actual patriots. Why couldn’t a black dude or a woman be hired for any job? Why not pay the woman the same as a man? Whazzup with that? We didn’t get it.

Will there ever be a disgust level with war which will help us change? Not until societies embrace the feminine, it seems. Women are always trying to fit in, but most cultures do not mix the masculine and feminine very well. How can a smooth polarity of the masculine and feminine be achieved, as cultures constantly chafe as this exuberant toxic masculinity continues to slow us down? Incivility and brutality is the result of the warrior elites dominance of most societies the last 2500 years. This incivility and wildness is not the primitive paleo wildness we have forgotten, but the result of the authoritarian despotism of manipulative men and the fealty of the sycophant chumps that ring their bell. This has led to a false patriotism, the War without end.  Always enemies to kill, God bless you.

          America is here as a place for you to breathe free, to be anything but ordinary if you choose, and to help hold the light of liberty for all who strive for freedom. I encourage all countries to create new covenants with their people to create equality and freedom. For people that want to escape repression, we need to create safe havens. Not a global order, but decentralized spheres of influence with minimum standards for all to follow voluntarily.  

We must upgrade our earth manners while creating permanent safety nets for all people.   Your good efforts will be returned threefold as the momentum of all of us working toward a humane humanity, is finally with us. Positive momentum wil feel so good. Unlike the recent decades of divisiveness. It is the darkest before dawn.

          The theme to most American movies, the good guy wins in the end, is all fine and dandy, but they have all been pyrrhic victories.  Life has to be more than vanquishing enemies. They won’t be real victories till we can:

  "1……Encode Liberty ….2……Embed equality…3…. invalidate injustice …..4… Ostracize criminality  ….5….humble the mighty …6  …, vanquish cruelty ….7 ….    cultivate opportunity  …..8…. "Unity Without hierarchy"  

in all the countries in the world. Let’s give ourselves the chance for a new start, with the rejection of violence, and usher in, at long last, The Dawn of Civilization. All of us together in every country: Out of many, one; Unity without hierarchy. We are ready.

THIS is my suggestion for a 28th amendment to the United States Constitution.

 Henry David Thoreau, "A free and enlightened State recognizes the individual as a higher and independent power, from which, all its own power and authority are derived." Citizens united against Citizens United.

 

-2-2-  - PAUL REVERE AND THE LIBERTY TREE

a)   The Great Elm

b)   Riotous Revolutionaries

c)   A storm was brewing along with the beer

d)   Disperse ye Rebels

 E   Liberty in Ascendance of Religion

 F   Libertas Holds the Lamp

 

                    a)  The Great Elm                                              

                  After another strong squall had blown in from the east, on that stormy day September 21^st 1938, and my dad bent down and grabbed the cap that had blown off his head. He said he tucked it under his arm like a football and ran the rest of the way home with his seven-year-old sister in tow. Although far out to sea when he went to school, the undetected and untracked hurricane had picked up speed, slamming into the Connecticut coast around 3 o’clock with 115 MPH winds.

The winds were still blowing over 90 MPH as the dangerous quadrant of the storm went through Hartford, where my dad lived; his mom, sister and he looking out the window as trees flapped like the neighbor’s laundry on the clothes line. My grandmother barely had time to bring hers in. My dad and his sister had walked home from school in 70 MPH gusts around 3:30.

The Long Island Express it was called, and this unseen hurricane was the strongest storm to hit New England in recent memory.  Just south of Hartford in Wethersfield, where my mother lived, the Great Elm, pictured below , held onto most of its large branches but was heavily damaged.

                    The Latin designation of the American Elm is Ulmus americana. With its downward growing roots and immense shady canopy, it had become Americas' street tree. A disease introduced around 1930 called “Dutch Elm Disease” ravaged these trees the next 25 years, and many boomers and their parents remember when they were torn down and replaced. Main streets across America were once lined with this stately, tenacious shade maker.   Then they were gone.  

              By 1966, the tree was merely a plaque on my paper route, a victim of Dutch Elm Disease and suffering from the stress, and slow recovery, of the ‘38 Hurricane.

            The Great Wethersfield Elm it was called and was cited as the largest Elm east of the Rockies.  Further down the road is Ye Ancient Graveyard and also the house George Washington stayed in as he planned the Battle of Yorktown. An old sidewalk that I would ride my bicycle on had 5’x 5’ stones, all wavy and crooked from tree roots, as I threw newspapers to customers.  Almost half of my customers near the Wethersfield Green lived in houses built before 1850.

                    To help you understand this story, use July 4th 1776 as your baseline reference. A high recognition date, it was the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, but how did the United States get to that point in 1776? From the Village Improvement Association of Wethersfield Connecticut; comes this quote about the Town Green on Broad Street in Wethersfield. 

                  “The Stamp Act of 1765 threatened Connecticut's tradition of self-government. Connecticut's participation in the War of Independence began right here in the shadow of Broad Street's Great Elm, where   500 mounted and armed, Sons of Liberty, surrounded Stamp Master Jared Ingersoll.  According to contemporary sources, Ingersoll then took refuge in a nearby tavern, presumably the Chester Tavern, at 138 Broad Street. With the crowd clamoring outside, he decided his job as tax agent was not worth dying for, and he resigned.”

          “On August 14, 1765, a group of men calling themselves the Sons of Liberty gathered together in Boston under a large elm tree near Hanover Square to protest the hated Stamp Act. The Sons of Liberty concluded their protest by lynching two tax collectors in effigy from the tree.

“Ten years later, as they retreated from Boston Towne, British soldiers defiantly cut the Boston Liberty Tree down in an act of spite, knowing what it represented to the colonists, and used the tree for firewood. This act further enraged the colonists. As resistance to the British grew, flags bearing a representation of the Liberty Tree were flown to symbolize the unwavering spirit of liberty.”   This quote is from the Village Improvement Association of Wethersfield Connecticut.

 In this chapter, I will give you a history of the origin of our American freedoms unlike any you have ever heard, and my version of the struggle to unite the 13 colonies that saw themselves more like 13 separate countries.

The Republic of Vermont  did declare themselves a separate country in 1777, but eventually joined the United States in 1791, sewing the 14th star on the flag after 14 years as the Republic of Vermont.

I must also make a basic outline for those who would like to know more, but who are still confused or uncertain about American Revolutionary History. Shout out to those who don't think they should care about what happened during the Revolutionary War.  It relates directly to our freedoms today.

You need to care because an authoritarian, neo-fascist entity, that wraps itself in the flag and cross while misleading the people of the cross, have now accomplished a stealth coup. You, at least, as a citizen and patriot, a voter and a worker, need to arm yourself with a contrasting viewpoint and here it is.  At least learn some basics about the Constitution and how the ideas from 1765 onwards, formed its inspirations.  Easily refutable lies are thrown around the media by ne’er do wells like Newt Gingrich and other white male supremacists, mis interpreting the American Constitution in their own bizarre way.

 I research so you don't have to, and I have found more raw facts than the engineered Conventional Wisdom would have you believe. Britain began to harness the colonies resources, while slowly raising taxes on colonists through the 1750’s.  The lower middle class and the poor, the homeless or the nearly homeless, as Paul Revere was; were all stout hearted, independent people who lit the pilot light of Liberty that winter of The Stamp Act in 1765.

Some say the founding Revolutionaries were Liberal some say Conservative, it's too long ago really, and the meanings have changed. Regardless, the Colonists found the bravery to defend the principles of freedom, liberty and libertarianism, against the growing coercion of British Rule. Inspiration for the Bill of Rights came from confrontations with British authority the next 10 years after 1765, most particularly in Boston, Massachusetts where the live, beating heart of democracy was born.

                The 'troops in the house' 3rd amendment seems odd, but not when looked at from the colonist's viewpoint, as the Redcoats bullied their way into people homes and lives during the occupation. “We must lodge here tonight and you are obligated to share your provisions with us.” A most basic freedom, it was logical that no one should have authority to force you to lodge them, especially in the case of the Redcoats who were becoming an occupation army.  Less known about the 3rd amendment is that it is about a basic right to keep all forms of government intrusion out of our homes.  That would include NSA spying on our phone conversations one would assume, and any other heavy-handed tactics in the future. Mrs. Noseypants across the street with the camera system set up for her by her CIA son. Keeps her safe but she films much of the neighborhood without permission.

       This is the story of the real Tea Party and the events that led up to the revolution of 1776, and the crucial role the Liberty Tree played in nearly every large town within 150 miles of Boston. 

 The American Elm as democracy; love it while it’s here.

b) Riotous Revolutionaries

It was the roughnecks, the visionaries, the apprentice helpers, and the hard drinking lower middle class that became heroes in the initial fight for American Liberty, not the Glenn Becks of the day with their chalkboards and half-truths. And not your preachers neither, with their clean fingernails and collection baskets. In fact, in my research, I find few references concerning patriot preachers during the Revolutionary Struggle; in fact, they seem conspicuously absent for a so-called christian country.

             The tea dumping, mock lynching, stone throwing, rioting revolutionaries of 1765 to 1775 did not allow religious bugaboo to cloud the clarity of their vision.  In fact, religion had cooled to the point of being inconsequential, in many towns. This is where Republican Revisionist Rightest Rogue historians are completely wrong when they perpetuate the lie that this is a Christian country.  Like Big Brother in the book 1984, they rewrite as much history that can be distorted, and enough people buy the deceptions. If you could make a dollar off a million Americans, you’re a millionaire.

 

I am going to quote what should be a significant book on American History, by an author who needs to be better known.  I find clarity in his writing that rings true to the facts and in my opinion, he tells an authentic story.  The book is called "Riotous Revolutionaries." His name is Robert Ellis Cahill and he has written a series of books about New England and particularly Salem, Massachusetts. He was a long-time sheriff in Salem, and he finally beat the so-called witches curse in the 1970's. The alleged curse that began during the witch hysteria of 1692. Sheriffs in the town of Salem always had bad luck for like 250 years.  He has a personal view of the people and events that led up to the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Declaration of Independence.  Robert Ellis Cahill gives a well-researched, eminently accredited background to show you the real people who started the American Revolution. FARMERS TAKE UP ARMS AGAINST THE EMPIRE is what the newspaper headlines would say.

 Republican revisionists continue to sell you a distorted view of the REAL patriots. It wasn’t the Robert Bennett’s or the Rush Limbaugh's or Bill o’Reillys, or anncoulters and glennbecks who instigated the Revolutionary War, and this is a fundamental truth I wish to convey with this article. Republican Teabag Entertainers would have been the pompous apologists of the British in 1765, mocking the rebels and their pipe dream of personal Liberty. Reconstructionists of the non-existent christian country that never was, these Republican pundits would praise the righteous rule of the King. I intend to repair some of the damage done by these Repulsicans who would be quite uncomfortable being in the presence of our actual founding revolutionaries. The actual greatest generation.

 Here is the history of the real patriots.

Mr. Cahill from Riotous Revolutionaries, chapter one- paragraph one,

“George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes was born August 25, 1742. He was named after his father George, who was a tanner, a glue maker, chandler, soap boiler and jack-of-all-trades in Boston Towne. He was given the second name Robert for his uncle who was a blacksmith in Boston. Father George didn’t like the name ‘Twelvetrees’, and since mothers didn’t go to christenings, he asked the minister of the church to shorten baby Georges middle name to “twelves”.

            “The Hewes family of fourteen was poor and lived in near squalor on Water Street near the docks of North Boston. The kids growing up in the area, Ben Franklin in the 1730's and Paul Revere in the 1750's, were among them,   were tough and water wise, fondly referred to as “water rats” and "wharf rats". As a youth, George Robert Twelves Hewes not only had to live down his name, with taunts from his peers and fights on the piers, but his size as well. His father, who died when George was ten, stood 4 feet 6 inches tall, and his mother was no taller, George growing to 4 foot 4 inches by age 17 and never gaining another inch.” Danny DeVito could play George Hewes.

                We can begin to see how this pre-revolutionary society was an economy filled with artisans and tradespeople, glue makers of all things, and jack-of-all-trades type people. Apprentices, dairy farmers, loggers, blacksmiths, carpenters and on and on, nearly everyone had a craft. Paul Revere eventually became a respected silversmith, but had his ups and downs at the beginning; and I am trying to imagine the bespeckled elder, Ben Franklin, as a youthful gang member in the 1730's. 

                    I want to continue with another favorite author of all time, Professor Richard Hofstadter. This from his book 'America at 1750',( 4 ) “We in New England know nothing of poverty and want; we have no idea of the thing" wrote Joseph Trumbull of Connecticut in 1764. "The price of labor is high and with this advantage we are able to take up a tract of land where ever we are able to settle it.

            This great ease of gaining a farm renders the lower class of people very industrious: which, with the high price of labor, banishes everything that has the least appearance of begging which we see so common in England." Arthur Young, the agricultural writer who saw much of the Scottish Irish migration once remarked on its quality. ‘They who emigrate are, from the nature of circumstances, the most active, hardy, daring, bold and resolute spirits, and probably the most mischievous also. The most visionary, the most impatient and restive under authority, the most easily alienated, the most desperate and cranky, were the most ready to leave the old lands, giving at least the initial population of the American Colonies a strong bias towards a dislike of authority.”

Pioneers were exploring the Great American wilderness and families followed behind them during the pre-Revolutionary period.  Conniving clergy followed THEM, looking for the free ride.  There were many prosperous, self-sufficient farms, but there were hard times in the cities by 1765, and a general unease regarding the Crowns authority throughout the Colonies. Industriousness was rewarded as noted, but the growing prosperity of the newly rich in the cities, was where the British Corporate Empire could interfere best. If your business became too successful, the Brits started making problems for you.  British corporations didn't like competition.

 

c)    A  Storm was brewing along with the Beer

Back to Robert Ellis Cahill writing about America in 1765, “All of America, but especially New England was in a depression. All of the imposed taxes, most believed, were the cause of the depression. Britain's Parliament caused food and clothes prices to go up. Seamen and dockworkers, some 12,000 people, were unemployed--- for them and the merchants; the new Stamp Act was the last straw."     

                “ The Stamp Act in the American colonies required all legal documents, permits, commercial contracts, newspapers, pamphlets, and even playing cards, to carry a tax stamp. The Act applied to papers, newspapers, advertisements, and other publications and legal documents, such as marriage certificates, and it was viewed by the colonists as a means of censorship.  They called it a "knowledge tax," on the rights of the colonists to write and read freely, hence, and importantly, this became the inspiration of our eventual first amendment.”

                    Robert Ellis Cahill continues describing the era of unrest and rebellion. “The Suffolk County Sheriff and the ten constables of Boston were frightened, for they knew they couldn't control the thousands of 'bully boys' of Boston, who every year on November 5th would parade the street carrying clubs and effigies of the Pope and the Devil.  This annual celebration of marching, singing and public drinking would inevitably turn nasty when darkness set in. Guy Fawkes Day was much like Halloween is celebrated today, with children in masks and coal blackened faces, going door to door costumed carrying Jack O' Lanterns and trick or treating"

                       "Following Boston’s example, almost every village and town in New England eventually had a Liberty Tree, and if there was not an appropriate large tree near the center of town, the people erected Liberty Poles. When November 1st 1765 rolled around, dockworkers refused to load or unload cargos, shops were closed, church bells rang, and every flag and ship-ensign was flown at half-mast. In Boston, the blood red stamps were delivered to Castle Island, but Governor Barnard didn't dare have his customs men bring them into port.

In other towns, if the stamps could be confiscated by the Liberty Boys, they were, and burnt in great bonfires.”

 “In retaliation the government closed all the courts, for the law was that no legal business could be transacted without the stamp. Barnard wrote to his friends in Parliament: "I am at the mercy of the mob. The power and authority of the government is really at an end."  There were no business transactions and little activity that terribly cold winter of 1765-66. Paul Revere, for one, was so deep in debt he almost had to spend the winter in jail.”

               Freedom of Assembly is discussed in the first amendment to the Constitution and its spirit is derived from the tradition of meeting at a tree in the center of town.

Many people are discussing the amendments to the Constitution these days, but what is the constitution about anyways? How did we get from 1766 to 1776? There is a Preamble to the Constitution but Republican knuckleheads don't think much of it. "It's not binding," they say, or "Not really part of the Constitution." It goes like this.

 "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America." Sounds like a mission statement to me.  

            Time waits for no man, and regarding 1766, Cahill writes, “The British Parliament had no option but to repeal the Act. And March 19th was to be the day of celebration, yet many Tories and government officials still feared retaliation from the bully boys, and although a couple of effigies of customs officials were hung on the Liberty Tree, and a few house windows were broken, it was a day and night of all out gaiety.

Drummers and fluters marched through town and wine flowed like water, houses were lit up with candles and people danced in the streets. The Liberty Tree was decorated with lanterns, 'till its boughs could hold no more' and the Liberty Boys sponsored a fireworks display on the common.  Paul Revere tacked a copper plaque he made to the trunk of the Liberty Tree, it read, "To every lover of liberty-August 14, 1765" being the date 'Olivers house was ransacked.'  The sacking of Oliver’s house was one of the first acts of defiance in 1765. Open houses and banquets, and John Hancock had a Madeira wine party, 'where barrels rolled onto the common for all to partake.'

       It seems as I read various, authentic accounts of history, religious fervor had greatly cooled since the bogus Great Awakening of the 1730's. The Great Awakening was a "spiritual revival", and the decade when preachers were out of the tent and off the chain, desperate to grow their congregations and keep their easy jobs amidst a steady decline of interest from the public. Preachin' Gods word was a craft, and one of the few that didn't need tools or made you dirty.  During these many riotous celebrations, remember it was liberty that was the moral vanguard of the Revolution, not the Ten Commandments. Freedom of thought and choice and association and assembly were newly burgeoning traditions anathema to organized religion. It was a blue-collar revolt, a Freeman peasant revolt, that occurred from 1765 to 1775 and that should be the model for us today in 2022.

   As stated in the Fundamental Orders of 1639 established by the Connecticut Colony, "authority is derived from the free consent of the people." Though crude, with a pandering to the white male god, The Fundamental Orders was a first step away from monarchal, maniacal and parasitical patriarchy. I mean, there was slavery till 1865 and women couldn't vote till 1920 and really, most advancements in the pursuit of Liberty have occurred in the last 60 years, starting in the spring of 1962. The pursuit of Liberty had to begin somehow, and the Fundamental Orders relit the pilot light of Liberty after the marginalization of the Magna Charta from previous years.

Those patriots did not achieve this revolution coming home from church. They were law breaking, window smashing, effigy hanging, cannon hauling, tavern singing patriots, whose hearts burned with a passion for freedom.

            D    “ Disperse ye rebels!!"

                     1767 came along and so did the Townsend Acts. Google this if you like, it’s about a tactic the British thought they could use to stop American smuggling. John Hancock's boat, The Liberty' was seized, but the cargo of Madeira wine had been delivered, which caused a great celebration. The British ship of evil opposed to the cause of Freedom and our pursuit of good wine, was called ‘The Romney'.

’ EDITORS NOTE: See how I used the Fox News style of putting 'evil ship Romney' into your brain without you knowing it? Look again. Nit Romney was on a Mormon mission during the Vietnam War. Remember that when you see him speaking in front of a 50-foot flag and talking about his corporate patriotism.

 More from Robert Cahill, this time concerning Samuel Adams--'brewer and patriot',        “Sam Adams activated his bully boys again, North and South Boston gangs united as the Sons of Liberty. “They paraded up and down in front of Governor Barnards house, shouting, whistling and drumming, 'making a great noise and hallooing' wrote Barnard. He complained to the king to send troops to, 'control the mobs that rule this towne.' The Governor now recognized who the ringleader was and he publicly called Sam Adams, 'Chief of this tribe of Mohawks.' Sam took the intended slur with a chuckle, and later would spoof the governor's comment by having his men disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians at the Tea Party.'"

            "'He is a grand incendiary," cried Lieutenant governor Hutchison, "a master of puppets.” To further resist the Townsend Acts, Sam Adams and Joe Warren asked all New Englanders to refuse the importation and consumption of any goods from England that were taxed, and encouraged their manufacture here in America."

            "One Boston merchant and shop owner, Theophilus Lilly, refused to follow the dictates of his fellow merchants by not only shipping in taxable items from England, but selling them in his downtown shop. One morning Lilly discovered a large canvas head, stuffed with straw, sitting on a pole in front of his shop, and the face was a likeness of him. There was a large finger and a cartoon of a man’s rear end painted on his front door, and a group of boys, wharf rats, gathered outside his shop to taunt him. A neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, known for his Tory tendencies, taunted the crowd and attempted to get a teamster to run over the boys. The boys started throwing 'filth and stones' at him until he retreated into the house."

            "Richardson grabbed his musket and fired out a second story window, wounding a teenager named Christopher Gore, and killing a twelve year old German boy, Chris Snider. A musket ball was removed from the wounded boy’s leg and Chris Snider was set in a coffin under the Liberty Tree-- and carved into the coffin were the words, 'innocence itself is not safe.' A funeral procession led by his family was followed by 34 carts, chariots and coaches and 1,500 marchers, including 500 schoolchildren. Christopher Gore later became governor of Massachusetts."

              Our current government is extremely over-tweaked as special interests, good and bad, have created a Tower of Babel that is stuffed with unconstitutional statutes, codes and ordinances.  An authoritarian excess and government over reach that our founding revolutionaries would find cringe-worthy. The Founding Revolutionaries would bring out the 9th amendment to the Constitution they created, and dispose of excessive laws in a timely manner

.               Luckily, the actual greatest generation of 1776 was a rowdy contingent of free people. You can bet women were involved but white historians are too hung up on battles and wars, then what people did during the wars.  Women have been whitewashed from historical accounts.  These ‘little general’ white historians. “Bring me another crumpet, if you please. The manipulation of markets by big business would also make Theodore Roosevelt wince, and our lack of courage and temerity would make George Washington face palm himself and say "WTF! Why did I even bother?"

                 In 1770, the Boston Massacre occurred and here is another quote from 'Riotous Revolutionaries.  “As they entered King Street, a thirteen year old boy stumbled towards them crying. He was Piemont, the barber’s apprentice. He blubbered to the crowd that the British sentry in his box outside the customs house, ‘cuffed me on the head with the butt of his musket, and I thought I was killed.’ As some stopped to examine the bump on the boys head, the others moved on past the State House and to the tiny sentry box nearby, located outside the custom house.

Private Hugh Montgomery stood in the box stomping his feet and blowing on his hands to fight the coldness in them, but he grabbed his musket and held it at the ready when he saw the angry mob approach. Leading the mob was a husky mulatto, a half black, half-Indian named Crispus Attucks. He carried a club and waved it in front of Montgomery's face. "If you molest me, I will fire.' Montgomery shouted at Attucks, aiming his musket at him. 'I'll blow your bloody brains out,' he screamed at Attucks, who was taunting him with his club. "You do and you'll swing for it" shouted the local bookseller Henry Knox, who later became a general in Washington’s army, and the lead teamster who directed the hauling of cannons over the Berkshires to Boston Harbor."

"Snowballs packed with ice, stones and oyster shells started flying through the air and landed on the scarlet coats and pointed hats of summoned soldiers."  Rope maker Sam Gray, without a weapon or even a snowball, was shot dead along with Crispus Attucks and others in what became known as The Boston Massacre. 

Today, traitorous Republican governors want state militias to be directly accountable to them, so they could shoot protestors if any of that Occupy stuff happens again.  The GOP suggests a return to child labor giving these children a newly lowered minimum wage of $5.25 for their efforts in 2018, and also to bring back child sweatshops again, among other outrageous notions.  

                The oligarchy is forming to fight the public at large, and goons are being paid off, brainwashed and armed, infiltrating the military and our police departments and interfering with peaceful forums on the internet.  I’m telling you, the corporations have started the war against us decades ago and we haven’t started to fight back yet. Unfortunately, we may have already lost since banks actually own most of the cars and houses and practically everything else in the United States and Canada. Those who have too much, need most of us to have nothing.

Escalating minimum wages around the world is going to create an economic boom. End War, tax all accumulated wealth, homes and food for all and building infrastructure around the world. The complete sequestering and elimination of nuclear weapons.

                 Continuing with the comparison with the First American Revolution, we continue to see the diverse nature of the people. From Riotous Revolutionaries, “Doctor Young, who John Adams said, ‘talked too much,’ was an atheist and Doc Warrens professional rival. He however, was a talented writer and wrote an effective treatise in which he comically reported among other things that ‘tea causes cancer.’ Appealing to all members of the household to boycott goods, posters in 1773 were plastered everywhere warning British ships had brought the dreaded tea and, ""the worst plague, the detested tea shipped to this port is now arrived in the harbor. The hour of destruction is now at hand."

                    “Josiah Quincy entertained a crowd with a patriotic speech. 'I see the clouds, which now rise thick and fast, upon our horizon. The thunder rolls and the lightning plays, and to that God who rides the whirlwind and directs the storm, I commit my country."  What God is this then that he called upon? Thor, Perun, Boreas or others?  Seriously! Can you hear me Asatruar? This is "not a Christian nation, but a nation of diversity," as President Obama noted early in his presidency assuring the world the Crusades were over. As Josiah Quincy gave this rousing speech, the local business people had dressed up as Mohawks and were headed for the 300 chests of tea sitting in Boston Harbor. The real Tea Party had begun.

Always remember that members of religious congregations were less than 20% of the population at the time, directly preceding the revolution. For more on the period between 1767 and 1774, feel free to research and come to your own conclusions. These are  opinions but if you check my information, you will find them factually accurate. Also, research the Green Mountain Boys who captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 to give more depth to that era. The British were routed from Boston Harbor with the cannons absconded by the Green Mountain Boys at Ticonderoga.

                  After Colonel Leslies retreat at Salem, Gage had received a letter from the Kings ministers, ordering him 'TO TEST THE PEOPLE TO SEE IF THEY ARE WILLING TO FIGHT'…….If there is going to be a war," Wrote Lord Dartmouth, "let it be brought on immediately before the Colonials can develop an army."

            "Major Pitcairn, who had been itching for a fight with the rebels for a long time, was chosen by Colonel Smith to lead six companies of Redcoats ahead of the column to secure Concords two bridges, north and south, leading in and out of that town.  It was Dawn as he rode, and his men marched, onto Lexington Green. "We saw a militia company assembled and other spectators milling about," the Major later reported, "and I ordered them to lay down their arms and disperse." 

Captain Parker, leader of the Minutemen, had called his men out of Buckman Tavern and onto the Green, because the tavern had gotten too crowded.  Said Parker, "… not to meddle or mix with the regular troops." Captain Parker told his men, some 77 in number and outnumbered ten to one, "don't fire unless fired on, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."

  "A few months after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Boston was under siege by British troops and the revolution was careening towards dangerous confrontations with a formidable invading force.” Author   Robert Ellis Cahill continues with a letter from a Patriot to his legislator, "An army is needed, to defend our wives and children. We beg and entreat you to save our country from absolute slavery," The Massachusetts Provincial Congress called 8,000 men, over and above the militia, to serve seven months. Some 2,000 Connecticut men under the fearless, roly-poly tavern keeper, 59 year old Israel Putnam, rolled into Cambridge with four cannons, and Nat Greene arrived with two cannons and 1,500 Rhode Islanders.”

            “Even Benedict Arnold came up from Connecticut and convinced Warren that with 400 men he could get needed cannons and ammunition from the British held, Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain.  Warren agreed to give it a try, but Arnold had to do his own recruiting outside Cambridge. On May 15th, Arnold, with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, took the fort without a casualty on either side. 300 pound Henry Knox was sent to upstate New York with a group of teamsters, given the almost impossible mission to bring the 58 captured cannons and mortars back from their fort back to Cambridge."

            “British General William Howe attacked the hill and 600 redcoats were repulsed by, 'old fowling pieces' as Gage called them. 'None of the Americans had bayonets, nothing but fists, clubbed muskets and rocks, but they fought on, more like devils than men.' Salem Prince, a freed slave, with his last round of ammunition shot Major Pitcairn in the chest and killed him. General Gage was so surprised at the outcome that he was heard to say, 'these rebels are not the despicable rabble too many of us have supposed them to be.”

             "With all this heavy intrigue going on in the Cambridge camp, Henry Knox was dragging 58 cannons and mortars, some of them weighing 5,000 pounds apiece, 300 miles from upstate New York and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains, using 80 yoke of oxen. He arrived in the Cambridge camp in late February, 1776. By March 2nd, the cannons began blasting the 78 British warships that were anchored in Boston Harbor. General Gage sent 3,000 Redcoats to attack the heights but a wild storm prevented them from even landing. “  Divine intervention the one time the Colonists needed it! Let me reiterate, order this marvelous book for your collection, “Riotous Revolutionaries” by Cahill.  The most personal and realistic view of the American Revolutionary War. My fourth favorite book behind Leopold Thoreau and Hofstadter.

Colonial Privateers were capturing British food cargo vessels and the Redcoats were dispirited despite their large numbers. Who would fight against another's freedom after all, especially when you were tired and hungry?  Meanwhile the hero of Cahills book, 4 foot 4, George Hewes, had escaped his captors in the bay near Boston and informed George Washington of the demoralized British troops. By March 20th, General Howe was three days out of Boston as Americans to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy, "marched triumphantly into Boston after British Redcoats 'quitted the town' and sailed for Halifax. Before leaving, British soldiers cut down the Liberty Tree and George Hewes was pleased to hear that when the Liberty Tree fell, a limb of it landed on a British soldier, crushing him to death." The 'despicable rabble' had finally stood up.

           “On August 13, 1835, over 60 years after Boston's 'evacuation day', a small article appeared in a Boston newspaper. It read, 'A ninety six year old man, said to be the last surviving member of the Boston Tea Party, visited Boston this week.  His name is George Robert Twelves Hewes."

You see, the Revolution was by the blue-collar types; the apprentices of yore, the tavern keepers, the post riders, among many others and us.  Don’t believe Republican Revisionist lies anymore about christians fighting for the Constitution    Veterans of the Revolutionary War  starting in 1775, would be sneering at most of the Tea Party, whom they would consider toady chumps for the Greedy Rich. Today they’d whack these cold-hearted war loving GOP chicken hawks on the side of the head with the smooth end of their muskets.

  We are the despicable rabble and if more refined and graceful people join us, this is fine; but it has to start somewhere, somehow--let it be here and let it be now. Let it begin with the despicable rabble, the independent majority, and if they mean to have us fight a war; let it finish here. I am trying to put a little wind under your wings as the sons and daughters of American Liberty and what we consider that we’ll to do next.

              Liberty Tree by Thomas Paine (partial quote)

 In a chariot of light from the regions of day, The Goddess of Liberty came;

Ten thousand celestials directed the way,

And thither conducted the dame, This fair budding branch, from the garden above,

Where millions with millions agree; She bro't in her hand, as a pledge of her love,

The plant she called Liberty Tree.

From the east to the west, blow the trumpet to arms,

Thro' the land let the sound of it flee, Let the far and the near,  – all unite with a cheer,

In defense of our Liberty Tree.

 

                  LIBERTAS    HOLDS     THE LAMP (my only poem)

When the greedy can mock the compassionate, when the slovenly moral can hurt the innocent,

 When the ones you love destroy your dreams, it becomes time to concede the hint.

Whether reform becomes  revolution, And  the  separation of church and hate, Calls  to us to secure  our means,

And cling to freedom to bring change to the state.

Falsely accused the righteous will plead, The veiled will scream and clamor for justice,

The gift of life falls from our grip, Game over friends, it’s the end of bliss. Poetry is power, the Egyptian understands,

and the camel concedes the passage is small. The gods cry and the goddesses cringe, Now hoping we will stand tall.

Pele erupts to bury the deceit and People look up to see the flames. Even the blind will see the light and History cannot record all our names.

Thank you muse and inspire me now To reach the souls who have gone dead and cold The evil conspire to deceive the lame

But clarity of vision is ours to hold.

We stand together to exorcise and train While Libertas holds the lamp aloft to see.

Temerity we seek with hope to claim A life worth living for all to be. The other side embraces and awaits our return,             

and with shield and sword, we discard our name. Swirling the whirlwind we ride tonight, V for victory and PEACE for all to claim

  Robert Graves said, "The function of poetry is invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and chaos that her presence excites." Something I must note that this entire poem came pouring out of me one day at the Laura Riding Jackson House. An obscure cultural reference; she was a muse to Robert Graves, he of “The White Goddess”. I acknowledge her inspiration and powerful presence.

 -2-3-

II22     

   In 1969 I picked up a second paper route and have been working hard ever since. 1970 to 2020. This year (2021) I celebrated a life of working too hard for too little by taking two well deserved, out of state vacations. I saw 29 states in 40 days though the priority was to find peaceful places.

      I was a notorious "staycationer" for thirty years in Florida although my spirit belonged to the mountains.  I grew up a river rat in Wethersfield, Bloomfield and Enfield Connecticut in the Connecticut River Valley, but places such as Pennwood Park in Bloomfield were remnants of the Appalachian Mountains.

    

             The interstate highway system had seemed like a good idea to me. As an American who believes that the Constitution is the law of the land, the interstate highway system fulfilled the constitutional protocol of providing for the common defense. Emergency equipment could be moved to any part of the country without worrying about the height of bridges or washed-out muddy roads.

         Long ago when I was seven and sitting in my sandbox, I could see Interstate 91 being built. Loaders, graders, dump trucks. They were far off in the distance but within view.  Such an inspiration for the highways I was building in my big red sandbox! A couple years later when I was ten, me and the boys took our bikes up on that interstate highway. It was like the Bonneville Salt flats. A huge expanse of concrete the likes of which we had never seen and we delighted in seeing who could make the fattest or longest skid. We'd practice wheelies without worrying about oncoming traffic. Do endless circle 8’s and play chicken. Crazy fun. 

     We'uns dint need no theme parks back in the olde days.

    The work was done on this part of I 91 and it was quite a few weeks before someone finally came along to tell us to skedaddle, "..get outta here you kids, this isn't a playground." 

Now that the rich have saved trillions of dollars in hidden off shore accounts for us, we can use this stolen labor (profit) to create the Infrastructure Initiative of 2022.   (II22) Envision something great for every one of us to use in the next 50 years in an expanded and expansive safety net, and a beautiful and enduring hardscape.   

One way to save money would be to sell half of our military bases, particularly the ones furthest away from American ports, keep it closer to home, right? The Constitutional mandate is for “a common defence”, not an international death star.

Prove me wrong, but the cost of keeping one soldier with all the attendant weapons, housing and logistical support could provide ten jobs domestically. Take all those paper tigers at the Pentagon coasting to retirement, and put them to work.  Put them behind a wheelbarrow, we got an infrastructure to build.

            The interstate highway system had seemed like a good idea to me, but a closer examination many years later exhibits its flaws. The reason we were compelled to test the highway before the public did, was because our baseball/football field was at the edge of it. 

I’d guess it was an early spring day when we went to play our first baseball game and a fence was there, about 75 feet from the highway and 200 feet from our home plate. We were like okay, a home run fence. It was pretty far away and there would be a handful of home runs, if any.

Today I realize these fences not only kept wildlife from running across the highway and getting run over, but also kept them from migrating as they had done since the Ice Age. All those fences were responsible for trillions of animal deaths as they were no longer able to follow their simple migrations.

           There was a tunnel under the interstate for Beaver Brooks ebb and flow and to the benefit of turtles, polliwogs and other creatures, but mostly I 91 blocked migrations of rabbits, foxes and all the rest of the animals who weren’t keen on walking in two feet of water in this tunnel or becoming pavement pelts on the road. 

Twelve years before I was in my sandbox playing with trucks, my mothers neighborhood was disrupted by the planning for the highway. Land had to be purchased for this stretch of the interstate highway system and eminent domain was used in Wethersfield. Mom’s River Road no longer a way to get to the river.

  

           The gray house in the pictures above and below is where my mom lived during the forties. River Road, Wethersfield Connecticut RFD #3, and the street was a stones throw from the Wethersfield Cove, which had been a port of note since the latter half of the 1600's .

Back then the plans for the interstate involved buying around ten properties on or near River Road and nearby. Buying them to be demolished for the new highway.

     They got a good price, my mom said, but people were not happy about it and she said, the neighborhood was never the same. 

       I was there recently and there is a house within 50 feet of the Interstate today, and I imagined this 20 foot wall of a highway was quite disturbing in the midst of a once quaint area with a nice green space.  (see photo) Who wanted to live with the constant drone of highway noise?

 

              

     What then of future highway building? I drove 13,000+ miles and went through 29 states in 2021 and I want to share my experiences and suggest improvements. II22 is the Infrastructure Initiative for 2022. 

 

Monarch Pass 11,312 feet

         I want to tell you about the state of our highways in 2021 and also that there is a whole lot more to infrastructure than roads. On the other hand, I’m kind of wondering what this Infrastructure Bill that is trying to get passed here in 2021, is about. I hear about child care and other social band aids in the bill, but nothing about bridges being fortified for strong storms and an ocean rise. #girdthegrid

             A plan that would include a plan for evacuating the elderly before a hurricane as one example. Tornado shelters in every vulnerable town. After a pretty strong hurricane, and the roads were somewhat cleared of trees, I went to see my 90+ year old customer first.  She was traumatized and frightened and "never wanted to go through that again."

 

             So yeah, 40 days, 13,000+ miles and 29 states later I have some opinions on the state of American roads and I would estimate only 5,000 of those miles were on the interstate. My GPS guide, Bubbles, took me on back roads and state highways everywhere and I saw how America really lives.  Even going out west in May, she found all the cool state roads and the only place I was in a traffic jam was in California (3 times). She took me to Rt 50 in Colorado and it was probably the most beautiful spring ride I could have ever had. 

              On the trip to New England in September, I got off RT 81 and asked Bubbles for the scenic route to Deposit New York, where there was an alleged Motel 6. From Old Forge Pennsylvania, where I slept on the side of the road and then driving to Deposit New York, I went on the most scenic 9 hour drive of the year. Six dead deer, unfortunately, (how many were picked up fresh for the deer processing facilities?) I went on Route 11 then 220 then 17 to Deposit. I saw SO MANY rural homes and noted how many people live. Too many planned communities and uniformity and HOA rules in my central Florida locale.

           I needed to get gas because I started the day at less than half a tank after the I 81 highway driving. I went through two tiny towns without any gas stations and finally in Millersburg there was a bodacious rest area.

 

        Something new I noticed are self-regulating, one-way roads. Instead of two people on walkie talkies standing there with their stop and slow signs, there were timed lights. Timed out to 5 to 10 minutes, it was a bit of a wait but work crews were busy tending to rock fall areas among other improvements. All those police officers with their lights going at construction sites cost the public 80 dollars an hour per car and officer so maybe some money is being saved.

          Well, the bill passed but I must say that it seems like there is already too much construction and repair going on. There is certainly the need for repair and for one thing, I crossed many bridges that appeared to have been built 80 or more years ago.   #girdthegrid

                  a) 55 MPH AHEAD

          Too many construction zones whose cement mini walls were disconcerting and scary and to me. In construction areas I would be part of the traffic funneled into one or two extremely thin lanes and those cement abutments are two feet from the car on the right side and even less when driving on the left. The scariest moments of both trips were driving through these areas IN THE RAIN. 

        Good Lorby Lobster, I could hardly see! People high beaming and beeping with me going 30MPH through these dangerous construction zones in the rain. And don't say I could have just pulled over because that is a whole 'nother problem. 

 

 

           On the trip to New England, I had a wonderful ride on Vermont Route 7a. Just beautiful as early patches of red and orange leaves began to appear. I left Pittsfield Massachusetts a little after noontime, (420 in the 413), enjoying the slowly setting sun to my left and taking the gently undulating scenic route, 7/7a, well up into Vermont to check on the progress of the fall foliage colors. 

          When it got dark and there was no more scenery to enjoy, I asked Bubbles to put me on the quickest route to Interstate 89. I didn't know at this point about the dearth of facilities. I assumed I'd find a rest area on the interstates, no problem, though I'd been fooled before on the previous trip in May driving in New Mexico. I went 100 miles in a state of extreme tiredness waiting for a place to pull over and had a nightmarish near collision with a tractor trailer.

        

 So I get on I 89 and la la la. Nothing, well surely when I connect with I 91 there should be a large rest area so I could at least sit in my seat to get three or four hours of sleep.

Parking area ahead I see on a sign but it was full of trucks. I figure I'll just keep going till I find a rest area with a bathroom. La la la nothing ... another parking area full of trucks. Finally, I made it, the Vermont Welcome Center was a relief to see. Lots of parking ... but ... the ... place was closed. Open 7 to 7. 

, they would make the rest rooms available? The doors were locked. This is all you got Vermont? As it turned out there are virtually no rest areas till the one in Middletown Connecticut. I must have missed the one in Massachusetts. This is a seriously important issue.

 

After driving on hundreds of state roads, I got the idea that the II22 infrastructure plan I was developing, would create rural hubs away from the interstates.  Large parking areas where people can stay and local people can sell their wares.

      I drove into the far corner of the Vermont Welcome Center and went to Whee behind some evergreens in the dog walking area. Every 15 minutes or so someone would park and check the door of the building in order to use the facilities and would walk away disappointed. I was kind of wired and couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep.

     A cop pulled in as I was trying to figure where I would go if he/she kicked me out and I tried to rest in my seat, but I really wanted to go in the back of the car where I had a cushioned space I made for a bed. 100 parking spots and I was the only one there and luckily the officer left, so I finally laid out in the back. Florida plates in Vermont, let me rest FFS.

On the average I can get a comfortable 3 hour nap in the seat of my car, but in the back of the car I could get 6 hours of good solid sleep with the six layers of various cushions and blankets and one of those, rated -20, sleeping bags for the top.

GREENHAMMER: Search results for download file (thegrimoireofgreenhammer.blogspot.com)

b) PAVEMENT ENDS

            Sticks and stones will break my bones but not if I use a cane. I was a bit early to see peak fall foliage but I observed the early stages, which was interesting in its own way. 

    

I found out that this is also the time of year when mushrooms abound and moss is thick and green. Every path I went on had tree roots sticking up and I had to be careful of tripping hazards.

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the drawing board. A new infrastructure plan should be a given, but the obfuscation of "yachtboy" Manchin and cynical Simena keeps it from totally happening. Even a 3.5 Trillion dollar plan is nowhere near a big enough plan, I'm sure.

                   I'm seeing lots of engineers leaving their petrochemical jobs in the near future, for jobs with II22 as the fossil fuel industry prepares to collapse. 

All these on and off ramps on the interstates are not easy to design and every aspect of a plan will need people that understand we have to consider Mother Nature and all her little creatures this time.

The planning alone will cost a trillion dollars to get it done properly. Some real work lay ahead. Challenging fulfilling work.

Prioritizing, designing in many new ways such as creating many more wildlife tunnels and overpasses. Forests saved from development and rural hubs built and dilapidated areas restored, renovated and towns renewed. Who is going to work on the wind farms in the midwest where most of them will be located?

              Jobs will be moving around as we begin to take back the Commons and Millennials take charge of the economy.

Seriously do you want a soldier in some distant continent pretending to preserve your rights, or ten people working as Road Rangers or bridge builders getting our shiny new infrastructure built.

        I've been on some entrance maps that are more fun than an amusement park. We need planners and designers. It all needs to be worked on and what this decade should be about.

                Sadly, there will be cases of eminent domain as I described before and so I propose a triple indemnity. Pay those relocated, three times the value of their property and long-time renters could also be compensated in this manner.

         Concurrently, large areas of forest need to be preserved around these rural hubs and MANY MORE rest areas getting built should be a priority. We need to start a de-corporatization of America and realize the innovation and invention we need in the future.

         One feature could be trail cams in these forested areas so travelers at the rural hub could watch at the rest area.  People can observe the local wildlife as they take a break from traveling.

       I drove on over a hundred lightly trafficked state roads, and a federal program needs to make sure these stay in good shape. My gas mileage was still very good on these state highways. Too many people are shoehorned into these incredibly crowded cities and Americans can be more evenly distributed throughout this country. A new Homestead Act has been proposed.

 

 .

 

         Rural hubs. 500 acres of preserved forest and wetlands along with the parking areas. Generally, at least ten miles from the interstates with an abundance of free space for local people to bring their food trucks or locally sourced products. Lots of people cleaning the facility. #jobsnottanks

Make these areas in run down abandoned towns near nice forests or swamp habitats. Habitats that can be preserved for all time. Buying private land for the commons and eminent domain for the highways.

 

Also, large darker areas to park overnight for people living out of their cars who are needing some sleep.  Someone in a tank in Africa or ten people back at home providing much more security for travelers, visitors and vacationers? The choice is yours. Here are the jobs for those laid off by the much smaller military I mentioned previously.

Most interstate rest areas are corporate traps with overly lit, parking areas.

 

  c)GPS SIGNAL LOST

              I was in Pennsylvania and was losing my GPS signal and getting low on gas. I had no idea Pennsylvania was so deeply forested and mountainous. I'll get the name and location later but, like a mirage, a gas station appeared. I had been worried of running out of gas and suddenly there was no cell phone coverage and I was greatly relieved. Next time I look ahead at the routes to come before I lose the signal. Icing on the cake my cigarette lighter charger stopped working.

I could have taken I 81 to I 84 and got to New England much quicker, but my phone had a no interstate protocol. I went with the flow of the no interstate directive and consequently saw so much more of America.

 

 

 

           Back to the mirage in the middle of Pennsylvania's Appalachians, this store had truly impressive displays of locally sourced products. From furniture to smoking blends to Cinnamon Pear Jelly. It was literally in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania's aptly named endless forest and was a fair sight better than most of the other farmstands I saw.

        With these rural hubs we can create economic activity away from the already busy highways. Driving 13,000+ miles I noticed something significant. Americas highways are oriented from the north and northeast to the west and southwest.

Chicago to Vegas. New York to LA. Everyone was moving out west back in the 50's and 60's when many of these roads were built. Florida to Oregon, Fageddabout it. Georgia to Washington State? South Carolina to Idaho. Not gonna happen. What I see as discrimination against the south. 

This is going to be important in future planning.

 

 

Sure there's I 10 but it's super boring. 

Blue Ridge

 

 Here is what I wrote for my trip to Oregon in May 2021

 

Johnny Huckster sees America

(Ye Olde Quest)

    After 50 years of ,“nose to the grindstone”, I gave my nose a rest and had a grand adventure.  My travelogue is in the “DOWNLOAD FILE” ON MY Greenhammer blogspot blog. GREENHAMMER: Download File (thegrimoireofgreenhammer.blogspot.com)

    Certainly not the preppy Grand Tour, I wanted to see the United States without getting into covid clusters and waiting in line anywhere. I wanted to see America but not necessarily talk to Americans. I've paid my dues being a good listener to those over talkers, and all their lines of shit these last 50 years.

 I want to also show a new way to vacation and propose that we build an infrastructure to last till 2080. There are people living out of their vehicles, and why not? The nature of work these days is transitory and temporary. That’s the reality of the United States today.

    It was March 2021 when I got the idea to go to Oregon finally. My gypsy friend was going back to the PNW for good and needed a ride. She was done with Florida and I needed to get away myself and I had always wanted to check out an isolated warm zone in southwestern Oregon. USDA Zone 9 located from Port Orford down the coast to California. There hasn’t been a freeze in years and I think they can consider year-round crops. 

 

Zone 10 is steadily moving northward in Florida, today its 50 miles north of this map.

 

     Several configurations of the trip developed and then almost came to a halt with a bad EKG on April 27th. “You’re not having chest pains?” my doctor seemed alarmed. He was ready to drive me to the hospital. This is shortly before I was to leave on my 7200-mile journey. 

     Weirdly, I thought I had two new skin tags, but they turned out to be ticks. I am getting older and it seemed that skin tags and age spots began appearing more frequently, so I try to ignore them. The skin tag under my arm began getting really irritated and I needed to find a way to get rid of it. Imagine my shock when I realized I could pull it off and though almost unrecognizable, it was a dead deflated tick. Died of a garlic overdose, still hooked into my vascular system.

The bite near my bicep still itches and is red six months later.

 So four days before we were to leave for the cross country trip, my friend seemed alarmed that I could have a heart attack at any time and we both became panicky and anxious about the trip we had been planning.

         Suddenly I had a heart condition and my extremities were steadily getting numb from nerve damage and on top of it all, what if I had Lyme disease from the tick? What if I became diabetic and slipped into a coma, having just been confirmed pre-diabetic? “ROAD TRIP”

  I had gotten a seven-week rental because my electronic nightmare of a van finally shit the bed and I needed to keep working. I couldn't get a loan for another vehicle so I took a chance with a rental. I’m glad I didn’t get a loan because it was for a Chevy pickup with 160,000 miles for 2000 more dollars. Dealers taking advantage of people.

I loved seeing my five children in 3 different states. I just missed getting the rental for a trip to Tampa to my oldests’ house with his 4 children.  Then the first weekend with the rental, I went to my firstborns new condo, helping her on the weekend of a 5K she had organized, and adding a couple plants to her garden.

       The next Thursday I picked up a rescue Pug named Jack in Vero Beach and brought him to daughter #2 in Raleigh. Saw my grand dog Louie and son in law Mitauex. Bonz the Cat does the best he can in a house with rescues and foster dogs.

My youngest had left the nest last year and also moved to NC and I visited him and his internet girlfriend who seemed to be doing nicely in Four Oaks.  A heavenly country atmosphere, it was out in the country and it was gratifying to see him out in the boonies. I spent the remainder of this 6-day weekend exploring the foothills of the Appalachians. A scenic Route 50 in Georgia seemed just as beautiful as the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Marys miracle site in Conyers Georgia

 

 

GEORGIA GUIDESTONES

 

                                                                                                                                                            mysterious soccer ball appears

 

 ROUTE 50 IN GEORGIA

 

route 50 in Georgia

                                                                                         

 

 

 

 

Jack the Pug

 A couple years back it seemed that everyone was talking about a bucket list and so I thought about it and I figured I had 5 things left. I wanted to get over to Austin and see Little M and I had also wanted to see the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Blue Ridge Mountains for a long time. I heard it was beautiful. I had no idea.

 #3 was to visit Amish country. I wanted to meet a few and learn about their culture. That was a practice vacation for what was to come.

This trip sounded like something I needed to do. Secondly, I’ve always had the feeling that Oregon was where I needed to go for #2 on the list and seeing the Redwoods became #1.

  Sure I’d like to see Solutre, France and the Niobrara River in Nebraska (the least populated part of the continental US) and visit Hudson Bay from the St. James Road, but I would be pretty satisfied to finish these five items.

     Glacier National Park sounds like, potentially, the most interesting national park to visit, and it would be really swell to see Katahdin in Maine, but, speaking bucket list, I had five to go.

Glacier opened its Sun Road into the park a week after  I had gotten back from going to Oregon in May. We’re glad we didn’t drive an extra thousand miles to see it. Here are some pictures from Colorado in May.

 

 

 

 

       The Blue Ridge Mountains was first on my bucket list since Austin was too far the wrong way to go this time. I vowed to go there on the next vacation.

In October 2018 I planned out a vacation to Connecticut, to Amish country and the Blue Ridge Mountains, but Hurricane Florence had just torn through North Carolina and closed many parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway for a week. Luckily the beautiful Blue Ridge had just opened back up a few days before I got there. Interstate 95 was washed out in South Carolina and the GPS had me on all small country roads to get to the Blue Ridge.

Hurricane Florence pretty much followed my proposed vacation drive through the mountains a week before I was to go, but the damage wasn't as bad as I imagined it would be.

I went to spot #77 in Section C at the Doughton Campground near Sparta North Carolina, and I had the place to myself for six days. Strong fairy spirits up there on the knob. 

So, the Amish visit and exploring the Appalachians knocked a couple things off the bucket list in 2018.

     2021 comes along and finally a chance to go to that isolated area in Oregon I hadn’t wanted to see and finally feel the majesty of the Redwoods. The pandemic was winding down but we weren’t in the clear yet. Commitments, logistics and complications changed the plan 10 times over the next two months and how do I justify a 7-week, 1500 dollar rental? I rented three extra days and with all the charges it came to $1800.

     Was this a $1500-dollar gamble? How did I possibly think my back would hold up driving 7200 miles after just driving 1800 miles for the Pug rescue in North Carolina see the Georgia Guiding Stones and the Holy Mary site in Conyers Georgia?

 Luckily, I didn’t overthink this one or how crazy the whole notion was.

     It seemed a bit of money was on its way, though not yet a sure thing, and that vacation out west to Oregon was finally within reach.

No point in going to any Covid clusters and the only two places I went in was the gift shop at Monarch Pass and the gift shop at Crater Lake. 

I saw lots of America and very few Americans, except at rest areas and it was good to see people were all masking up as I was, but I was also yet to be vaccinated.

Everyone in the world was supposed to get the shots and I couldn't help being suspicious, so I waited as did my client. This turned out to be a good thing because our hosts in Oregon were anti-vax preppers who would not have welcomed vaccinated people and their shedding proteins. 

    Gas was easily $600 for the trip. Motels $500 more. Food $300 easily. No income from work for three weeks. The plan seemed precarious at best.

For sure, there were at least 15 rest stops I slept at. AND, I also had three residences to stay at and that worked out great.  I actually did more socializing than I am used to with those seven days in normal housing.

   Most excellent hosts in all three cases and with three different groups of people. Slept well and had fun with my people and the one thing this disparate group has in common, though, is “Freecycle.” Freecycle: Front Door

    Disconcertedly at the start, it took 22 hours to get out of Florida. A strong storm had passed over us and our trip to Oregon almost ended before it got started. I left the impression I was heading for “the mountains”, implying the Appalachians, knowing I was setting out to see the Rockies for the first time in 37 years. Less than a handful of trusted people knew my plans.

Too many buttinskis out there intent on telling me how to enjoy my first long distance ride in a long time. I don’t need the endless advice or the Tour books or go see so and so.

    A return to Arizona was peaceful, seeing the low desert plants of the Southwest as the sun rose. I’d never done much more than drive through Colorado three times in my youth, but this time I saw some deep Colorado.

    Rugged Route 50 in Colorado was dangerous with its descents but there was breathtaking non-stop scenery. By planning a Mid-May ride, there were snow covered mountains the entire way. Afterwards I read Rt 50 is called the “loneliest road in Colorado.” My passenger/friend/client and I hardly talked as we watched the scenery unfold for the next 1,000 miles into Utah Nevada and Oregon.

 

 

 

 

 

TELLURIDE

 

 

 

 

       I remembered the ride through Nevada and Utah seemed a bit boring a long time ago when I was young, but now I know so much more about rocks and tectonics and shit, it become absolutely fascinating. I love the mountains so much again.

 

 Anyways, here I am with my client (friend actually, but hereafter known as the client as I was creating the prototype for my “driver for hire” side hustle.)  

     I have been telling people the last five years that the economy is going to reassemble itself and opportunity will abound and everybody in every field needs to be playing some heads-up ball. Plumbers and mechanics will find work, your kids with their hard earned MBA’s to be white collar functionaries for the capitalist takeover of the world, can be artwork on the wall or something. The world of 2030 will be different than what we can imagine today. America needs to shed its white collar parasitical economy and learn to work again. Class War. The workers vs. the parasites.

    We needed networks to connect in the past as Americans unionized to create and created a giant middle class. and now we can enable this so much better in many ways in our modern computer era. Easy to connect with fellow quilters and amateur astronomers and those creating Pollinator friendly yards(or with the latest groups created, such as ‘freecycle’).            It's all happening so fast and I don't know how I would deal with it if I was younger. I'm out to create something brand new at this late stage of life as it is.

Connecting food communities, organic growers and fighting for migrant workers that many of us will be. Meat Eaters Vegans and intentional communities trading together.

 

People need to add a balance to the overwhelming influence of governments and corporations and religions.  I really believe the American people are going to see themselves through all this. We can go back in the past to bring back the good ideas we abandoned. One would be to make rural hubs and large rest areas as a partial return of the commons that were stolen from us. Tax the largest landowners and purchase the properties for organic farm initiatives. The rich have become lazy and the working poor have always been industrious.

    We can make the connections that will create the networks of the future. We can create our own economy as if the old one doesn’t matter is my battle cry. The old one best being described as crony capitalism.

 

 

 

 Getting out of Florida

    Driving Interstate 10 west, we were six hours out of Boynton Beach. A windstorm and downpour had just finished. The road was misted and it was difficult to see even twenty-five feet.

 A TREE appeared out of the mist across at least two lanes of traffic and we hit it direct ...dead on. Like, I don’t even tell people cause I’m not a drama queen like that. It nearly broke through the windshield in three places and I shit you not we could have been impaled by a huge branch. If I skidded and swerved and went into it sideways that could have been it. National News “two people impaled in I 10 last night in a bizarre act of misfortune.” Luckily there was not even time to put on the brakes to stop, only to reduce the speed from 45 to 30 to reduce the impact of a dead tree blown by a tornado on to the highway.

 

    It hadn’t fallen off a truck and it was a large thirty foot tree stripped of its branches. Or so I thought. But there were fresh needles everywhere. A Pine Tree you see, we found needles over the top of the engine when we looked. It did impale the radiator area.

    We hit it straight on and the windshield nearly exploded with glass and theoretically we could have been impaled had the branches been pointing towards us. A branch had found its way into the engine area nearly popping a radiator hose and leaving behind many pine needles.

So 7 hours into the trip we drove a mile more into the rest area that was our destination. Miraculously, our battered steed made it and got 6 hours of sleep. Enough of that day.

When I saw a dead pine tree walking in the woods, one day recently, I noted its ghostly white color and it looked exactly like the tree we hit. I cant explain the needles though.  

There must have been a tornado. Pine needles covered the slow lane and shoulder for the mile leading up to the rest area. The next day when we left there were many trees that were in the road but were cut.

 

   We called the police and Budget rental Car very early in the morning and to make a long story short, we had the originally rented Rav 4 replaced with a Jeep Compass by eleven. Might have to pay a fee for not being able to go pick up the Jeep at the airport 39 miles away. It MIGHT be as much as $425. We’ll find that out later.

So from 1 o’clock the previous afternoon when we drove a car to Boynton Beach to drop it off, till we then finally reached the Alabama border, we were finally, 22 hours later, leaving Florida for day 2. So, we nearly got impaled by a 30-foot tree that was laying across Interstate 10, but we ended up getting a nice vehicle upgrade, and were finally on our way to Oregon.

That afternoon we drove through some scenic state roads in Alabama (231?) and stopped at a quaint farm stand/eatery for the big healthy meal of the day. There were chickens loose in the store and everything. We had a fabulous healthy late lunch there and drove on. Night fell and I white knuckled it through Memphis and drove through Arkansas in the dark. “Slow down Memphis” the sign pleaded as motorcyclists and cars passed us going 100 mph. I seemed to be having some trouble with city based, busy highways and traffic seemed too intense.

    We parked in what turned out to be a motel parking lot and were told to leave and then an empty lot nearby, but got gently thrown out. We finally slept for three or four hours at Walmart. Daytime came and we spent much of that day driving through Nebraska.

    The Cherokee had two bodacious gas stations. Large clean areas with lots of choices for travelers and the highways appeared to be freshly paved. The GPS Guide, Bubbles, seemed to be keeping us off the interstates and on much more scenic state roads.  I learned later that too many roads out west are oriented for mid-westerners going to California and not the south to the Northwest.

 

     There was a Route 412 in Oklahoma that traversed that really thin part (handle) of Oklahoma that I found interesting. I had really begun to notice that people living in these areas had really trashy yards. Now this coming from a guy who had a yard full of stuff once upon a time. My hillbilly yard filled with things “I might need someday.”

     It was puzzling to see 10 or 12 cars but then I saw yards with 50 or 100 cars. 55 gallon barrels. Rusting leaking? Tractor attachments, PVC stacks, etc.’ People in the red states don’t throw anything out.

      But you know, it seemed that in all these “hick” towns the American people had gone back to work. Businesses had trucks that were busy being used and metal building doors were open. I had yet to see a shuttered-up business.

          So I was racking up some miles driving with no aches or pains yet. We finally arrived in Pueblo Colorado at 6:00 and checked into a motel. Seedy thought my client but I could care less. I slept in a sleeping bag on top of the bedding and used my own pillow till I left it somewhere. It was there I got into the habit of leaving things behind. I left my blue ice in the freezer and so became more dependent on ice though I did get a block of ice, one time, that lasted over two days. Deep thin coolers work out best.

          In Pueblo that night we bought legal and had a smoking room so, voila. First time I could administer my medicine in a hotel room without Ozium and incense.

          Then we got on Route 50 in Colorado and it was non-stop, breathtaking scenery from there out. The Jeep Compass was climbing and climbing, getting half the gas mileage it should. The gas pedal was hardly responding and I figured we had gotten pretty high. The altitude I mean. Then we got to Monarch Pass which sits on the Continental Divide at 11,312 feet.

            The mountain forced me to breathe deeply and it felt good though I could tell it would take some getting used to. Then down we went and eventually I would tire of the 7% inclines and giant tractor trailers passing me out in the passing lanes, but at first it was exciting and dangerous. I read later that Route 50 is called “the loneliest road in Colorado”

 

 

 

Spring was just starting in Mid-May in Telluride

 

 

          The goal was to reach Telluride for a second motel rest on this six-day trip. At 7950 feet, my breathing was labored here also, but deep breathing that Clean Colorado air also seemed to do a lot of good.

          The client went to a hot spring up the road and I took a nap in the Jeep. The next stop was Crater Lake. Following that was the rugged scenery of Colorado and at night we drove through Utah and then Nevada’s stark beauty became apparent as dawn approached.

          Truthfully, by the time we got to the Oregon border, we had had about enough sagebrush country. Took the Oregon Redwood trail and saw and touched my first Redwoods. So, there I was with an empty bucket list and a motel within view of the Pacific Ocean.

          The next day we got to our destination in Port Orford, Oregon and I was finally going to experience this anomalous warm area that was in southwest Oregon. At the motel near the beach, I noticed the largest Geranium I remember seeing in my entire life. I lived in Tucson for six years and people had their Geraniums for three years and they weren’t half this size.

 

 

 

          I would later come to learn the Port Orford area rarely freezes and rarely gets too hot. It seems I had found a place that doesn’t freeze and doesn’t burn, and I have to consider a move to this area. 

                  I think it would be fun to escape there to trim buds for a month or two during the outdoor harvest in August and September when Florida is at its hottest. It seems almost too cool. Every time I check the Port Orford ten day forecast, the average high and low seemed to be 65 and 52 and it was pretty cool the three days we were there. When those western heat waves happen it might get over 70.

          The folks in Oregon were busy with their garden, but took us to a very nice path near the Pacific Ocean.

PROBABLY COULD USE MORE DETAIL HERE

Shedding proteins, and wonderful home schooled children.

Redwood puppies, the bark with soft bark. I just about fit in the Jeep Compass and spend two nights in it. The first morning I open the door to the sun coming up and there was a huge Crested Jay, right there. I had some distinct experiences with Magpies in Telluride I have to remember. No one is really interested in my stories and I’m like oh well. I want to share and swap stories, but boomer men are all about what they’ve accumulated in the rat race.

 

When I left the trailer park in Oregon, I should have turned right to get back to 101. I went left figuring the first right turn would get me on Rt101 again. I drove down an increasingly narrow road for 19 miles that had no right turns. I knew that because I came upon a sign when the road forked finally and both ways became dirt roads with four numbers on the sign. “Rt 101 19 miles”

      I got a clue when I saw grass growing in the road. You can tell there had been some landslides looking down at the cliffside and up at the higher elevations, everything was sliding down to the river below and cracks in the road where there were visible rockslides. The road kept getting thinner and thinner and I didn’t see any other vehicles and I got to wondering why. Nothing seemed familiar. It didn't occur to me to turn around probably because of the thin road and the cliffs. There wasn’t room to turn and often there are good results from getting lost when fate grabs the wheel. 

  A rule of driving is not to get lost on a lonely dirt road and when I came to a fork in the road and both choices were dirt roads, . I turned the Jeep around and saw the sign. 19 miles to Rt 101. The other way. I was nearly in Humboldt County in California. 

Murder Mountain | Netflix

 Well, I was two days behind schedule and decided I was just going to drive right through California and get past Kingman Arizona by the next sunrise, 20 hours away. Sometimes I had to settle into long hours of driving. California could be a vacation by itself but not this time. Time to hoof it to Austin.

 I had slept in the car for two nights and was feeling good. I had about five layers of different materials such as yoga mats and sleeping bags and an outdoor lounge chair cushion laid across the back.

    Arizona and New Mexico, though boarded up, were much more starkly beautiful than I remember. The entirety of New Mexico seemed to be in dire economic ruin unfortunately. In the previous 15 states it appeared to be that America was back to work.  Not in New Mexico though I didn’t visit Albuquerque or Santa Fe or Taos.

MAYBE MORE DETAIL HERE ABOUT unnecessary cattle GRAZING and small business entrepreneurs getting the work done because being a cowboy in semi-arid lands is a tradition.

After the visit to Shiprock I got on 481 South and figured I could sleep at the first rest area I come across on Interstate 40 east. So, I get on the interstate and thirty miles go by and I am thoroughly tired and I really need to stop. I drove quickly to get through California but I drove 14 hours with three traffic jams on the day that started with me almost getting lost in Humboldt County California.

 

Sixty miles go by and I’m like “what in the hell!” There always seemed to be a rest area just in time, but not this time. Here comes the fatigue driving. I count backwards from 100 to 1 and then start again with 99 to one then 98 to one backwards. Out loud to keep as many facilities working as possible. There are other tricks to keep the mind alert but I’d driven 20 of the last 30 hours and seriously needed a break.

There was an exit with lots of trucks but nowhere for cars to park. Then I did a big circle for about 8 miles following an apparently drunk GPS lady and there was nothing anywhere that was safe from thieves and highwaymen. Finally, I saw an area that was 200 by 150 feet with several trucks were parked. I nearly got hit by a tractor trailer while I was going left toward this wide open space while the truck was signaling to go on the 40 East entrance ramp. We crisscrossed each other by like, inches, and I saw the corner of the truck a few feet from the windshield. I never want to be that tired while I was driving again. A regrettable risk, but a good lesson.

I slept 5 hours there and took off raggedy without coffee. Ten or twenty miles later there was relief though I did wee when no one was driving by at 3 in the morning.

I must have spent ten hours driving in Texas before I got to Little M’s house. So much ugliness coming out of Texas, it seems, but they definitely won the wildflower award. Vast areas of flowers and diversity spread throughout the Texas highwayside. The hill country was impressively scenic and I thanked my luck with all these fabulous roads I drove on. The, NW to SE routes, ignored by the interstates.

I was tired, having driven 35 of the last 55 hours so I was thankful to be able to stay in Austin for 2 and a half days to rest.  M and her beau listen to the most interesting mix of music. New stuff to entertain my ears.

I was mirthful to discover that Austin has so many wildflowers and a Central Park of its own and a world-famous natural spring. We walked to the largest bat roosting area in an American city and I didn’t hear it though my companions did.

Trying to capture the parts of America you don't see on TV. New roads, new lands, new people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

May and October tours. Cannabis friendly stops. Colorado can’t be beat and Massachusetts is all that’s good in New England.

 

      GPS guide took me down two questionable dirt roads but they worked. The nine hour ride from Old Forge to Deposit included the only clusterfuck of the trip. My cigarette lighter charger went out. I had 1% charge suddenly, so I had to pull over and test the other plug-thing behind me.

      Shortly after that I lost the GPS in a remote area and drove down some dead end roads by trying to guess the route. But it was all scenery you know? My goal was to get to Deposit by 1 and after this, 3 o’clock became the goal.

Enough 7% inclines for a while. Where were the cannabis dispensaries in New York? Turns out they hadn’t gotten it together yet. Now imagine people selling bud at the local rural hub? 

Signs said “women only” I noticed on my two trips this year. I hate to say it, but the smaller the town the bigger the ignorance. In an enhanced infrastructure program, there would be MANY more bathrooms to be built. Areas with bigger stalls for anyone to use Men Women Babies Anyone.

 

Take care of the people who need roads, trails and sidewalks. Bicycle paths, Scooters and remember mopeds? Okay a 100 million dollar federal infrastructure project. State road 11 and local road 111 meet in the middle of Pixville. 20 million is spent purchasing nearby pristine forests and swamps. Up north of town hub road #54 is going to be built connecting state road 11 and state road 22 that winds its way northwest to the river.

Build it and they will come. Pixvilles population booms and soon Lakeside, six miles away has bed and breakfast and Second Breakfast facilities. RV parks opening up everywhere. People vacationing to the caves 20 miles south begin driving through this area.

We have to encourage working from home to relieve traffic everywhere else.

RV parks and yards with many cars and debris and what looks like a mess as observed from the highway.

Trucks that are running, are busy, though. America is back to work. Flyover country for you jet setters. Got a plan for that shit too.

 

E? PAVEMENT ENDS

Going back to my trip to New England recently

          ways to pay -defund energy dept reduce military. You fund this by taxing accumulated wealth, not current income. The people doing well don’t need to be bashed in the back of the knee with taxes. The individuals and companies that have accumulated billions have saved enough money for us to completely rebuild the American infrastructure with compassion built into this time. For the animals cut off from their migration routes and for the humans abandoned by a compassionless economic system.

            II22 You absolutely have to have a nationwide bus system. Free for all so all that paperwork and government mumbo jumbo, and who qualifies for what discount is eliminated. People visiting sick friends and relatives? Why does everyone have to have a car?

        The goal is to cut down the cost of living. Anyone who runs away screaming about socialism or Marxism isn’t getting how I am talking about the self-governing goal of the future.

Primary to this is to set up a solid infrastructure. An infrastructure to have what we and those unborn will need till 2080.

             Interstate 3. will be highways built exclusively for trucks. We need shipping and those truckers are a menace with their tailgating and spiked hubcaps.

18’8” could be the minimum height for bridges on truck highways.

           Think Big. No kill shelters is infrastructure. Tornado shelters. Costing peanuts compared to this bloated sow of a military. The USPS acting as a non profit banking system is infrastructure. Hey, I’m not convinced this global trading order is working out. Worser things are coming after Covid, this global supply chain is full of weak links.

Road rage in New Britsky. I took very few notes, I needed to be 100% alert, but I noted this one. The most pocked holed Main Street of 2021 in New Britain. So here I am, I just scored at Dunkin Donuts headed for Rugged Mountain. Kind of an early morning traffic tie up and I’m like hyper aware and suddenly two cars ahead of me stopped dead. I had time to stop though things fell on the floor.

Behind me I hear a crash about three cars back. Then yelling. Nobody needs that shit but we are risen apes and we do the best we can. Don’t pay attention for a couple fucking seconds and you get in an accident. I got in an accident with a rental that way. It was an amazing 6 months. 13,500 miles and 29 states. Not knowing where the next place to sleep would be and seeing how many live. There are more homeless than is realized.

 

-2-4- NON-PROFIT BANKING   

      With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, the American Founding Revolutionaries greatly feared a central banking system.

Imagine all the work involved in building a house with all the different contractors; and compare this to a banker who makes the same amount of money with a click of a mouse. They make as much money as the builder and all the contractors   PUT   TOGETHER!

Amazingly, I hear no one trying to reform this system.

           It's all pure profit for the Banksters, since they don’t need tools or trucks to move and install their product, like roofers, electricians or landscapers. They don't even need stagecoaches anymore like they did when banking was dangerous. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone is intensely trained to avoid. Well; we rationalize, we signed a contract and nothing could get done without the money involved in a loan, right? People tell me this and I think “what servile chumps they must be not to call out this gangsterish . It’s part of our gritty reality, that banks can make these outrageous, engorged and fully ripened profits, and too bad for families and homeowners, who pay at least five times more interest than they should. Did we forget, "Authority is derived from the free consent of the people"? I'm outraged that people retreat with their tails between their legs against these bankster crooks who make the Mafia look like bumbling amateurs.

           The tea party protestors don’t seem to notice this robbery out in broad daylight, and Faux news doesn’t see it either because they are too busy inspiring brave individuals who are urinating on Islamic prayer rugs and telling everyone else they are going to Hell.

          Was it President Andrew Jackson that said bankers were nothing but a den of vipers, or was that Jesus? In the 1830’s Andrew Jackson managed to eliminate the National Debt while calling the entire banking system, ‘A pit of vipers’. Or was it Jesus that called the bankers, "a Den of Vipers", I can't recall. Andrew Jackson was determined to get these parasitical leeches off the life blood of the country. With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, the founding fathers greatly feared a central banking system that would feed upon the healthy commerce of an emerging nation.

 I have an idea for a new kind of banking company that would charge a true 10 percent, and it would break even. This new bank would loan you 100,000 dollars, and you pay back 110,000. It's as simple as that, and the question is, how much would the paperwork cost with nonprofit banking?  Every loan Banking executive would make less money in this system, because it would be a slimmed down operation that would handle this loan. HERE’S YOUR NEW SQAURE DEAL!

 And happy people with refinanced mortgages, interest deleted from college loans or car loans for cars over ten years old. Someone has been paying off that car loan. Along with payments for everything else from laptops to refrigerators, would be reduced 10 to 60 percent. A stimulus program the government doesn’t have to pay for. Non-profit banking would reconfigure all the loans to 10% of the remaining balance, and bill accordingly. It's not that people can't afford the items they get on credit, it's the interest paid, that weighs down consumers. They don’t have to charge that kind of interest. Period. Give these fucks some non-profit competition.

                The basis of the common 30 year Home loan is the institutionalized price gouging, the front loading of ten years of interest right at the start, so capital doesn’t get paid down for a long time. With this non-profit 10% system I am suggesting, it becomes a 20 year loan instead of 30 with a house. There has been a smash and grab robbery of the middle class by the banking class system and its why people won’t feel guilty about taxing wealth. Once people understand. A hundred thousand dollar loan to most people ends up as 200,000 dollars of total payments when you add in the accumulated interest and ten extra years of payments.

              Another horror of this anachronistic system to me is the fact that the interest is almost all front loaded, so people refinancing with lower rates end up paying for the principal twice. I fell for that scheme.

               This is really a crime, and we have allowed it. Legalized theft, I don't see what else you can call it.  They penalize us like law enforcement with these late fees, LIKE WE ARE SPEEDING OR RUNNING A RED LIGHT. They have these supernatural rights beyond any individual and they get bailed out, to boot. This is the corrupt white-collar class robbing you in broad daylight and Glenn Beck wants to talk about restoring honor to America. Wake the fuck up conservatives.

             One day a child is born and a father puts a couple of hundred dollars into a savings account for the child and years later, when he goes to move the money to a CD, he finds the account empty due to “inactivity fees.” The population has been screwed in many ways like this. 50 billion dollars in overdrawn charges in 2013. If I was in Congress I would propose a ten dollar limit to all fees, everywhere. Banking is rich in corruption and are the true drag on the economy but the billionaires have managed to brainwash people thinking that the poor hold us poor.

So clear, so plain, and these reasonably priced loans I suggest, could be such a stimulus package for 50 million struggling American home owners---why is no one discussing this? Nonprofit loans could be very popular. In my case, I could pay off my house loan and save 75,000 dollars in interest payments if I could get a loan like this. Many millions can feel closer to owning their home.     

Very importantly, the evil Bankers use these gouged profits to buy up and accumulate land and buildings and assets as tax write offs, while investing in companies that pollute our waterways and contaminate the groundwater.   Mother Nature loses with every turn of the wheel. When we’re ready to rise up, it will be sweet to see.

Bankers financed the brutal western expansion of the United States, and therefore sponsored the silent slaughter of most of North Americas precious fauna. Beavers and mink turned into fur. Wolves extirpated in state after state to raise sheep. Rivers dammed and streams gutted and lakes polluted, as America was recklessly bulldozing nature. Money doesn't grow on trees, it is trees. The cheap homes of the 50's and 60's that the Greatest Generation sold for 10 times as much during real estate booms, led to the demise of southern forests.

Americas Corporate legacy will not age well in the history books. AS toxic sites are cleaned up, I see activists archiving the corporate activity that led to cases of toxic pollution. Time to stop polluting and let's break down all these toxic wastes. Chemicals combining underground even create a new substance. Dioxin is frequently created by 2 bad chemicals mixed together. This toxic brew needs to be cleaned up, not encouraged.

            What’s the reality here? You are trained to not be aware of rapacious, gangrenous, oozing greed as it haunts your life with payments that are far higher than necessary. It seems wrong, but don't think about it! You are raised with the double brush brainwashing of worshiping authority and shaped by the greatest generations' mantra, "you can't stop progress". Seniors look in dismay at their CD, and see a .083% interest, and remember the time in their youth when they got 5% with their savings accounts. Even to them, it is apparent the banksters have found many schemes for accumulating their fortunes but they are resigned to make a token objection now and then.  Today we have arbitrary late charges that are really not earned, but more like civil fines, than business between two adults. 

 To hear Andrew Jackson put it, “If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution by the morning.” Shame on all you people, worried about the ‘ground zero mosque’, and gay marriage.

           You were right Jesus, bankers are evil, and thanks Andrew Jackson, for the worthy effort you made during your presidency, eliminating the federal debt owed to bankers. I know he is despised for being a genocidal maniac but we are talking about corrupt banking here,

Here is how non profit banking would work. A Non-profit banking company, loans your hard working family 100 thousand dollars with 10 percent interest. A real ten percent, a non-usurious 10 %, an authentic, stripped down, no bullshit loan. 100,000 is lent and 110,000 is paid back. How much paperwork is needed in this computer streamlined world? For Gods sake, give these lending institutions some competition.

          Non-profit banking is not socialism. It's common sense.  

 

 

-2-5-    

                A NEW SQUARE DEAL

           A NEW SQUARE DEAL. Not a New Green Deal. People won’t buy it. Progressives want to separate themselves the best we can from the virtue signallers. The obsessive single issue city slicker liberals. They ruined the Green party. You know; abortion, immigration and gay exhuberance are not the hills I want to die on. The workers revolution, the earth and fighting fascism can be our three legged stool.

        The conservative three legged stool are christian nationalism, anti-communist paranoia (and all socialism), and an authoritarian worship to keep the rabble in line. So what we do is, consume the Green party since they are on the ballot in 47 states. A third party to light a fire under the ass of the languid liberals and ridiculous right wingers. The Independent majority needs to be heard and we were once. The Progressive Era 1894 to 1914. In the 1912 election all three presidential candidates called themselves Progressives. This irked the elite to no end. Importantly we need to show right wing worker who has their back. Not the bankers, or tech giants.

        All we have to do is start running Progressive candidates as Green party. From here on we work on the platform committee. More railroad signals less virtue signalling. So here’s some scattershot of what the Progressive Party was. It became the nexus of change forcing corporations to start following rules since they really can’t be trusted.

“We of the American Progressive Party seek government accountability; an end to wars of aggression, a vibrant economy including living wage jobs, sustainable environments, social justice and constitutional rights for all.” The American Progressive Party from Facebook

    Progressive Platform of 1912(100+ years ago) THE BULL MOOSE PARTY

The Platform aspires the best for people.

"The conscience of the people, in a time of grave national problems, has called into being a new party (the Bull Moose Party), born of the nation’s sense of justice. We of the Progressive party here dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the duty laid upon us to maintain the government of the people, by the people and for the people whose foundations they laid." I might add the guiding principle of liberty. “The foundation of authority rests with the consent of the people.”

"We hold with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln that the people are the masters of their Constitution, to fulfill its purposes and to safeguard it from those who, by perversion of its intent, would convert it into an instrument of injustice. In accordance with the needs of each generation the people must use their sovereign powers to establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice, to secure which this Government was founded and without which no republic can endure."

         "This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.”

REMEMBER, THIS WAS WRITTEN IN Nineteen 12.

THE OLD PARTIES

"Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.

From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

We resolve to destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

The deliberate betrayal of its trust by the Republican party, the fatal incapacity of the Democratic party to deal with the new issues of the new time, have compelled the people to forge a new instrument of government through which to give effect to their will in laws and institutions.

Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler commonwealth."

“A COVENANT WITH THE PEOPLE  

This declaration is our covenant with the people, and we hereby bind the party and its candidates in State and Nation to the pledges made herein.”

********************************************

       Amazing how relevant the Progressive Party at that time seems to us here in 2022. The Green Party is like a fish flopping on the dock. Trying to stay alive, despite having the progressive message that a majority of Americans agree with. They cling to the dead ligaments of liberal hand wringing. The last gasp of the Progressive Party was when Henry Wallace ran for President in 1948. Independents are a vast majority but have nowhere to call home. I’ve known very few Republican or Democrat loyalists, most people I’ve met don’t belong to a party.

        You see, if there are only two parties, then one of these two will always have the power. So, our politics has become this battle between these two Machiavellian milquetoast malcontent parties. Don’t let them fool you. To the Democrats, the poor are their charges, their responsibility to manage. Managed liberty. If you don’t own anything you can receive indigent care. Some people have a good asset but can’t work. Too many stories of deprivation to tell here of liberals bungling the funded money and making excessive bureaucracy.

          They don’t really want to work at solving the poverty crisis. The Republicans are the country club elite and their lackeys carry water for the world oligarchs. Nothing I can do as they look right past you.

ROUSSEAU  “since no man has any natural authority over his fellows,  and since force alone bestows no right, all legitimate authority among men must be based on covenants.”

                         

                                                                                                                                     

 “Come York or come Hampshire, come traitors or knaves,

                         If ye rule o’er our land ye shall rule o’er our graves

                      Our vow is recorded, our banner unfurled

                   IN THE NAME OF VERMONT WE DEFY ALL THE WORLD”  

                             

                               The Green Mountain Men of Vermont

                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                              

          The New Square Deal takes the battle royale of class warfare to the town square. A NEW SQUARE DEAL. Is it the New Deal or Teddy Roosevelts Square Deal? It’s a combination of both of these successful socialist initiatives. What the fascists have been trying to kill for over a hundred years.

FROM WIKIPEDIA   "The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program, which reflected his three major goals: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. These three demands are often referred to as the "three Cs" of Roosevelt's Square Deal."

 Listen, the Green Party is pretty cool and I have been registered green in my county since 1994. My small business is called The Garden Green and I promote green gardening and nature friendly landscaping processes while focusing on pollinators. Sometimes gardening, always green.

The Green New Deal will hit people wrong, right at the start. They might vote for the Green Party if it can get a better focus on the workers situation. People hear the word green and they immediately go to socialism or communism. The dim bulbs of America are totally obsessed with communists and so to remove that taint, I suggest we use a bit of the New Deal and The Square Deal. The New Square Deal. To once and for all create a covenant for all Americans for all time to protect them instead of allowing a permanent underclass to develop as is happening today. This is the hill I could die on. Not abortion or immigration or ABCDEQUALITY.

                                                                                                                                              

          We have to put the religious kooks in their place but we need atheists to understand the importance of faith Green Ethics and Polytheist Spirituality; A potent brew or strange bedfellows? Polytheist is my code word for pagan because pagan is such another strong word in our culture. The brainwashing is so complete that the word pagan brings up evil or negative impressions with probably 85% of the population. Pagans are known for their freewheeling antics in their American pursuit of happiness is how I see it. Greens however, are often antagonistic to spiritual beliefs, generally because Christianity is so patently objectionable to logical people, but they don't realize there are alternatives. 

     They find Noah’s Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah and the book of Revelation as preposterous and burdensome to the American psyche. Islam is so thousand years ago, that it is given virtually no credence or relevance, and rightly so. Islam once spurred the Middle East to great learning of the maths and sciences, codes of cleanliness, and works of expressive art in the hybrid vigor of melding with Pagan cultures as they took them over. . The Fundamentalists ruined the basic pagan nature of it around 1100. Then it became the really DARK Ages.

       The nine noble virtues are far more relevant to a pagans life than any ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ type of commandment. Vikings or the Norsemen have a belief in the old gods still, and in modern times are known as Asatru or Asatruar. I wonder what has ever happened between a meeting of a follower of the Norse and a tree hugging environmentalist.  Do members of the Green Party object to the nine virtues?  How could they? For that matter what do atheist greens think of Buddhisms eightfold path? Or the dumbed down version of morality, the Bible?

       Asatru finds a way to help people deal with everyday reality and the eightfold path lights the way for many in the world. You know and christianity does it for people to. Have all the beliefs you want. Believe in Noahs Ark but also believe there were dinosaurs. So to the greens I’m asking you to rethink the role of religion and spirituality and consider the more reasonable outlook of the various religions. The religions and cultural practices of the many conquered people and cultures around the world that have fallen to the cross and scimitar. With civil and human rights gaining ground around the world, people are getting back up and brushing themselves off for a fair fight.

      No one blithely gives god credit for all these variables in life, nobody I know, and I want greens to know that many of us don’t try to describe the nature of the universe or the miracle of life with all the answers, as christians do. There is a great majority in this country from all demographics who would agree on many things. The convulsive social issues get the media face time though. Teddy Roosevelts Progressives were a varied lot but found this common cause to fight for.

     Preachers pastors and priests all telling us what god has told them. Imagine, the TV evangelists are sending blessings and miracles over the airwaves. “And god, ah knows you be busy, but Doris in Kansas City has just sent a generous donation for our building fund and want’s you to cure the paralysis………in her brain from listening to me.” Is this any way to run a country? I object so very strongly to this gleenbeck initiative to inject god into our country. Freedom of religion means you live your eightfold path or follow the nine virtues. You don’t pray to something invisible on the 50 yard line. We all add strands of diversity to the tight weave of our freedoms here in the States and wherever liberty is treasured and protected.

     Some of us have other gods such as Perkunas, Perun, Boreas or Zues, or in my case, all of the above along with 19 others. I’m a polytheist but I have to hide this fact because of the book burning, book banning, pitchfork carrying purveyors of the “word”.  

      My main point is that all of us free minded people need to keep the United States on track with a form of patriotism not often heard. How would Thomas Jefferson be spending his days in 2022? He would be loving the diversity, exploring the technology and would be engaged in the lively blogs of the day and having the time of his life. He would have contempt for the continual attempt to stuff everyone into this christian box of conformity and would probably have a show to directly oppose Fox News. It took a real effort to keep the pastors and preachers at bay.

        Contrary to the killing done in Jesus’ and Allahs name, polytheists are not actively engaged in conversion. They give you freedom of religion and there is no preaching about god and punishment in hell. That sounds like a familiar phrase, freedom of religion….where have I heard that before? Oh yeh, the Constitution of the United States. So if you are a green atheist, I can understand your antagonism to religion, but chill out with people who have beliefs. Churches putting giant billboard messages for you to read on your way to work, in god we trust on the money and on and on is a dealbreaker for democracy and unconstitutional if someone had the brass ovaries to speak this truth.

     Atheist greens say two hands planting a tree is far more practical, and reality based and does more than any 10 hands clasped in prayer. Our diversity is the high thread count in the quality of our constitutional fabric of freedom. Religion is pollution in the eyes of many and this is what the Progressive Pagan Patriots intend to do. Fight for our freedom, a simple civil rights for pagans. Not in Vietnam or Afghanistan, but like the civil rights activists fight for right here in our own country. People need to get that. A moral high ground hypocrisy, and a continued disconnect with nature is all that exists within the power structure now.

     Pagans and polytheists have ceremonies that connect them with nature and atheists find it all ridiculous. I find the Lord and Lady ceremony and the twirling athame in the dark as irrelevant to my life, but I do have some nature respecting ceremonies instead. There is no “Gaia cult” that is going to put Mother Nature in ascendance over the bible god, no takeovers of constitutional governments.      Once conservatives are done with the Dr. Suess controversy, they will very likely seek other targets.  Media personalities such as radio star “Mancow” are preaching that there is a dangerous “green cult” of people who are going to reduce the worlds population by 90%. Well, that’s me and I’m not dangerous. Media personalitites all striving for that dumb ass dollar.

       There are greens and there are Gaia lovers but it seems thus far, but never the twain shall meet, and to tie environmentalists to eugenicists is absurd.  I suggest a population cap of 9 billion that the world can reach voluntarily, and I get accused of being a eugenicist.

     We can be like the Green Mountain Men and fight for what we want to preserve. They took up arms to keep their independence just before the Revolutionary War. New Hampshire and New York bought and fought to take over Vermont. Vermont remained free and some 10 years later they became a rowdy contingent in George Washingtons army. As an ally. A country named the Republic of Vermont.

      Many greens have no connection to the divine and that’s fine with them, who cares and why waste your time they ask? The simple fact is that the greatest generation and their youthful lackeys and apologists have done 7 generations of resource extraction in one and that’s bad in itself, but to say that a deity told them the earth was theirs to plunder, is simply, stunningly re****ed. No offense of course. Then they see pagans wear antlers or flowers and dance till dawn and they shake their head and go their lonely atheist road. I was often an atheist but Paganism is fun.

      Religion will tear this country apart so I am calling everyone to work for our common goal. Hail the Constitution. Praise the bill of rights. In Libertas we trust. Freedom of religion needs to be clearly defined and will be part of a New Square Deal. No invisible leader of our country.

 

Theodore Roosevelt speech after he got shot in 1912

     “Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.”

        “Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap.

     I have had a good many experiences in my time and this is one of them. What I care for is my country. I wish I were able to impress upon my people -- our people, the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents. I say now, I have never said one word against any opponent that I cannot defend. I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said -- nothing that I -- nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.

       I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign, and I ask it not for my sake, not the least in the world, but for the sake of common country, that they make up their minds to speak only the truth, and not use that kind of slander and mendacity which if taken seriously must incite weak and violent natures to crimes of violence. Don't you make any mistake. Don't you pity me. I am all right. I am all right and you cannot escape listening to the speech either.

     And now, friends, this incident that has just occurred - this effort to assassinate me- emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the "Havenots" arraigned against the creed of the "Haves." When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history. When you make poor men - when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.

 “ Theodore Roosevelt

Remainder of Progressive Party platform 1912

THE RULE OF THE PEOPLE

The National Progressive party, committed to the principles of government by a self-controlled democracy expressing its will through representatives of the people, pledges itself to secure such alterations in the fundamental law of the several States and of the United States as shall insure the representative character of the government.

NATION AND STATE

Up to the limit of the Constitution, and later by amendment of the Constitution, it found necessary, we advocate bringing under effective national jurisdiction those problems which have expanded beyond reach of the individual States.

It is as grotesque as

it is intolerable that the several States should by unequal laws in matter of common concern become competing commercial agencies, barter the lives of their children, the health of their women and the safety and well being of their working people

for the benefit of their financial interests.

EQUAL SUFFRAGE

The Progressive party, believing that no people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on account of sex, pledges itself to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike. Eight more years till women can vote.

 PASSED IN 1920 America emerges from third world conditions!

CURRENCY

We believe there exists imperative need for prompt legislation for the improvement of our National currency system. We believe the present method of issuing notes through private agencies is harmful and unscientific.

END THE FED

The issue of currency is fundamentally a Government function and the system should have as basic principles soundness and elasticity. The control should be lodged with the Government and should be protected from domination or manipulation by Wall Street or any special interests.

CONSERVATION

The natural resources of the Nation must be promptly developed and generously used to supply the people�s needs, but we cannot safely allow them to be wasted, exploited, monopolized or controlled against the general good. We heartily favor the policy of conservation, and we pledge our party to protect the National forests without hindering their legitimate use for the benefit of all the people.

Agricultural lands in the National forests are, and should remain, open to the genuine settler. Conservation will not retard legitimate development. The honest settler must receive his patent promptly, without hindrance, rules or delays.

We believe that the remaining forests, coal and oil lands, water powers and other natural resources still in State or National control (except agricultural lands) are more likely to be wisely conserved and utilized for the general welfare if held in the public hands.

In order that consumers and producers, managers and workmen, now and hereafter, need not pay toll to private monopolies of power and raw material, we demand that such resources shall be retained by the State or Nation, and opened to immediate use under laws which will encourage development and make to the people a moderate return for benefits conferred.

In particular we pledge our party to require reasonable compensation to the public for water power rights hereafter granted by the public.

We pledge legislation to lease the public grazing lands under equitable provisions now pending which will increase the production of food for the people and thoroughly safeguard the rights of the actual homemaker. Natural resources, whose conservation is necessary for the National welfare, should be owned or controlled by the Nation.

GOOD ROADS

We recognize the vital importance of good roads and we pledge our party to foster their extension in every proper way, and we favor the early construction of National highways. We also favor the extension of the rural free delivery service.

WATERWAYS

The rivers of the United States are the natural arteries of this continent. We demand that they shall be opened to traffic as indispensable parts of a great Nation-wide system of transportation, in which the Panama Canal will be the central link, thus enabling the whole interior of the United States to share with the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards in the benefit derived from the canal.

GOVERNMENT SUPERVISION OVER INVESTMENTS

The people of the United States are swindled out of many millions of dollars every year, through worthless investments. The plain people, the wage earner and the men and women with small savings, have no way of knowing the merit of concerns sending out highly colored prospectuses offering stock for sale, prospectuses that make big returns seem certain and fortunes easily within grasp.

We hold it to be the duty of the Government to protect its people from this kind of piracy. We, therefore, demand wise, carefully thought out legislation that will give us such Governmental supervision over this matter as will furnish to the people of the United States this much-needed protection, and we pledge ourselves thereto.

CONCLUSION

On these principles and on the recognized desirability of uniting the Progressive forces of the Nation into an organization which shall unequivocally represent the Progressive spirit and policy we appeal for the support of all American citizens, without regard to previous political affiliations.

NOT THE GREEN DEAL BUT A NEW SQUARE DEAL

  -2-6-    MARXISM IN AMERICA

Do we follow the 9th commandment ……or the 9th amendment of the Bill of rights constitution thingy? In the case of tea party ‘patriots’, the answer is neither. In the absence of law, the 9th amendment says we must use precedence and the spirit of our constitution to make decisions. The Tea Potty has warped the meaning of this and this will be one of our constitutional wrestling matches this year. The 9th commandment of the bible talks about bearing false witness and needless to say glennbeck will spend an eternity in hell just for what he has said demonizing Progressives. The deception and half truths from todays neo-cons is the epitome of bearing false witness.
            We anticipate the logjam of the Liberal-Conservative debate to break soon and
new ideas, independent ideas, will burst onto the media. A new culture has begun to rise up. It’s healthy greenery will grow a canopy over the dying, destructive, death dealing, war loving culture of Manifest Destiny.  We will evolve out of this entirely corrupt predatory capitalist system.

            The Populist-Progressive era of 1890-1915 is being revised for modern times but Progressives are called Liberals and I’d like to tell you why that is partly wrong. One star of the Progressive era was Teddy Roosevelt, a populist conservative, who was often at odds with big business, although there also times when he was accused of coddling business.  He was one of the few in power that was brave enough to confront the predatory monopolies head on. He was also enough of a conservationist to have started the National Parks system and the National Estuary Program. There was also Bob Lafollette, “fightin’ Bob’ and the muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair who wrote “The Jungle” exposing the disgusting conditions in meat factories.
.
            Earlier in the late 20^th  century the GOP had people like Phil Gramm and Cal Thomas, glennbeck, George Will, Billo Reilly, Anne Coulter, Half-Truth Hannity AND the great deceiver, Rush Limbaugh. They all truly defined the phrase, “mean spirited.” They are moral high ground, hypocritical, corporate apologists carrying water for the greedmeisters. They insist on trying to hold up the crumbling façade of manifest destiny and acting out the “white man’s burden.” Ann Coulter tells us that god gave the resources of the earth for everyone to use. It’s such a load of nonsense that needs to be countered

In a book called The History of Gardening, Neal Fairbairn quotes George Washington who said, "How much more delightful is the task of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be acquired from ravaging it."

            People are waking up to the fact that 30 Independents in Congress and 10 in the Senate would keep either entrenched party from holding a majority and controlling the situation. Independents: be they Green or Libertarian or Progressive. Progressive Independents can investigate corporate greed while on the other side of the spectrum, Libertarian Independents can root out government waste. 
     “Surprising as it may seem to those who equate the collapse of communism with the failed ideas of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, there was actually little connection between the two. Marx would have applauded the Soviet Union going into the dustbin of history, as it exemplified all that he stood against; a corrupt oligarchy blocking the forces of production.” Jude Wanniski

      People here in Indian River County are in a panic that Barack INSANE Obama is turning us into communists right under our noses. Socialism will devour us! Yikes! What is this socialism and why do we need to tremble at the thought of it? Our President is a commie Marxist? I have read Mr. Obamas books and I didn't get that impression AT ALL. Here in America, we cover our children’s ears to protect them from what a sitting President has to say and call it “don’t tread on me”.  In retrospect he was the best Republican president since Eisenhower, not a Progressive. He had the most difficult job in the country, which was reviving a dead economy. If he was a republican they’d be all like “best president since Reagan.”

       Remember in 2010 when the Obama speech to schoolchildren was boycotted by angry Republican parents? It was fear mongering similar to the McCarthy Era and the Great Awakening of the 1730's and people are falling for it again. The fear mongering put the Tea Party in power. The letters to the editor page in our paper, The Press Journal, was filled with the dire warnings that our country will turn socialist, communist or Marxist and they try to muddy the waters of logic best they can. Staple tea bags to your head as a talisman to protect yourself from Barack Khrushchev Obama.

      Well, I will tell you what. I really have never read Marx, but I do understand that communism is a proven economic and environmental disaster. Let me go check out some websites to figure this out (be right back). Well, I found a distinguished iconoclastic conservative and his quotes about Marxism. He takes an objective look at what Marx said and I quote some of his comments. His name is Jude Wanniski and he was an adviser to Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981, and designed the Reagan tax cuts during his first term in office.


    In 1978 Wanniski started Polyconomics, an economic forecasting firm, a business focused on providing investment advice based on political and economic analysis. He became a controversial figure in the conservative movement at the beginning of 2003 when he vocally opposed the impending US war with Iraq. Here is this intellectual conservative speaking truth about Marx, “Because we naturally equated Marx with our mortal enemies throughout the Cold War, we found it easy enough to think of him as an evil genius, who would have nothing to teach us today. In many ways, though, his original insights are more valuable because we now no longer have our vision of him colored by adversarial tensions. Indeed, when I visited Moscow in 1989 at the invitation of the Gorbachev government, I told my hosts, with only a slight smile, that 'Marx would have been ashamed of what you have done here in his name.'"

     Wanniski continues, “What would Marx observe unfolding in China, which is, of course, still technically a communist state? First, it would please him enormously that China is now the fastest growing economy in the world. Just as he greatly admired the United States of the 19th century, with a government subservient to a fluid society and its own brand of untrammeled, klondike capitalism, he would see China at a similar stage of development. The western intellectual aristocracy remains befuddled, transfixed by China's explosive breakout. What is going on under their noses is a rampant, democratic capitalism developing from the bottom up, with Beijing's Communist Party standing aside to keep from being trampled by the unleashed energies of 1.2 billion ordinary people. Marx would cheerfully observe that there is no Big Business in China! The remnants of the Chinese business class escaped to Taiwan years ago, just at the point it was congealing into a new oligarchy. These are young Chinese who are starting fresh, advised to get rich by an 89-year-old admirer of Marx and the historic forces of production.”

     Jude Wanniski continues,“The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the principal Establishment voices in America, are horrified by all this. China is setting a bad example, its ordinary citizens actually getting rich by paying no attention whatever to the IMF, World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, or the British colonial interests in Hong Kong. When Deng Xiaoping looks for outside advice, he draws upon the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Hong Kong, now patching things up with the Taiwanese. “ These have been quotes from Jude Winniski.

     On October 27, 2004, he publicly denounced George W. Bush, saying that "Mr. Bush has become an imperialist; one whose decisions as commander-in-chief have made the world a more dangerous place".


    What this noted conservative is saying is that Chinas economy is thriving because there is not much of a white collar parasitical class yet. What I’m telling you about, will also work here if American innovation can be unleashed with freedom for small business and a reputation for quality and the right to repair can become prominent. The advantages that corporations have written into law the last 100 years were to get around the trust busting initiatives of Teddy Roosevelt and now we have this law debilitated nightmare created by our congress and senate. The coral colony of lobbyists needs to be investigated.

    There will be no communism in America. There are ways to over throw the capitalist economic overlords and it starts with the banking system. Bankers are the vanguard of Predatory Capitalism and their Institutionalized Greed needs to die, not a war fighting the phony threat of creeping socialism. An innovative blue collar oriented or small business world can ignore the needs of big business that always seems to need taxpayer bailouts and require toxic clean ups: while they roam the globe for the most servile labor force. Corporations thought nothing of putting their pipes directly into bodies of water create a toxic amount of pollution in the 20th century.  


    To me, the massive wealth accumulated by the banks is also the absolute pinnacle of predatory big business, a transfer of wealth from the middle class these last 30 years. More overdraft fees than banks getting robbed. Thomas Jefferson said, “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have a government by the majority who participate.“ What was developing in 2009-10 was a growing mob mentality similar to the McCarthy Era that was fueled by the neo-conservative hairballs. The ones participating in this faux hysteria carry psychological pitchforks to suppress the independent majority with their sputtering outrage at “Health scare”, the Twin Towers mosque, and beheadings by Mexican drug gangs and other bullshit issues that keep Progressives from getting down to business to help small business gain their first advantages in 100 years.  


     One reason I had to be without healthcare by the end of 2009 is because of the inherent greed that most health practitioners will readily acknowledge is rampant through the entire system. Our insurance costs went over a thousand dollars and I opted out because we couldn't afford it. Ask the family whose life savings has been absorbed by intrusive fancy pants, end of life procedures, as elderly parents last days were filled with indignities to keep them alive a few days or weeks longer, adding tens of thousands to an already bloated hospital bill. We have the best health care in the world? Yes, if you are a hypochondriac getting 5 MRI’s a year for every itch you have. As George Bush fiddled to Cheneys fires, this health care inflation became the major cause of personal bankruptcies .

    You have to weigh in and make your influence felt, otherwise, you are accepting the tyranny that will fill the vacuum when good people do nothing. Never mind Freddy Kruger and the Halloween movies, the proven failure of communism is trotted out to put fear in the gelatinous lump called the American electorate, the goober nation. Barack Maobama is turning America into Communists right under our noses! Notice it didn’t happen. He didn’t even write any executive orders limiting guns in any way.

           I have a dream where America will not be a place where my five little children are to be a herd of toilers to pay off the pension funds of those who worked in the weapons or chemical industry. Then there's the AIG’s and other banks who produce no actual products other than to make more money for those who already have enough, and are too big to fail. But not too big to take the handouts in the form of taxes from my five little children and 50 million other children who will soon become taxpayers.

     We have two Americas, one where Earle, Eugene and Carlton(made up names,) drink from the health care fountain gushing unlimited MRI’s and 300 dollar a month medications for 15 dollars, and the non-insured fountain dribbling not enough care for people like me who can no longer afford to subsidize those who have ‘worked hard all their life’. Trust me I’ve worked hard all of my life, turning my passion into income but working with the earth as a gardener does not pay like those careers in the extractive, investing and polluting industries.


     This is why the Health Care bill works for most of us. We are all in this together now, preventative care costs rise now for a lowering of prices later. It’s called long term planning and I wouldn’t expect those with pensions and good medical coverage to be supportive.

-2-7-   SOCIALISM IS FOR LOSERS

Here is an inside out look at the question I found posted on a forum.
How many people understand socialism and understand it's destruction of America THE WRITER ASKED? You know, that bit that we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

Tongue in cheek, this was my response. “It hasn't destroyed us yet. I invested in GM in the 50's but taxpayers cleaned up the toxic waste from production facilities. Then I got a job at Dow Chemical where I made a lot of money from the government designing methods to deploy napalm in Vietnam. Then I invested in a high profit company that obtained numerous government contracts and when they got caught pouring iridium down a well, we got fined peanuts. As this nuclear waste found its way into the water supply we all laughed and clipped fat cigars at the country club.
            But then I realized I didn't have quite enough money so I got together with an old friend in the late 70’S, and we took great delight in bulldozing forests to make suburbs. When the sissy state I lived in started cleaning up the rivers, and made my friends update their smokestacks with those damn clean air laws, I moved to Florida where I got involved heavily in sugar production, making gargantuan profits in the 80's as Americas seriously began to overeat and sugar was a tremendous growth industry. We emptied the Lake Okeechobee watershed and farmed the rich mud. By farming I mean applying lots of chemicals. Taxpayers are now paying for a 2 Billion dollar cleanup of the Everglades and I still have 5 homes. Losers.
              Now me and my fourth wife go out to Chez Gougeeng every night in our Rolls Royce and there's a rags to riches story for you. My newest wife grew up in Appalachia with coal dust in her fingernails and asbestos in her hair but joined the army. She got lucky because for 18 of her 20 years of service, all she did was sell boots and shoes at the commissary and now she has a lifetime pension and free medical care. She doesn't need it really because we are so rich, but it's nice to know it's there just in case Obama takes from us rich people who have worked hard all our lives."
. 

-2-8-CONVERSATIONS     with  CONSERVATIVE CONSERVATIONISTS

               Will conservatives and conservationists continue to battle about our future? Neo-Conservatives decry the “so-called damaged environments, and the oppressive Endangered Species Act.” Saying it’s all a hoax. There’s no problem. On the other hand, Conservationists go too far with excessive regulation. Poor lawn mowing dudes, scraping by, can be fined $5,000 for spraying some weed killer. USDA goons look the other way with citrus growers, but not poor people who can’t afford the fines imposed by lawyers. For instance, I can’t prune mangroves the way I think that is best, the way I have done for 5 years that has resulted in the nicest mangroves on Indian River Boulevard, so I no longer do. (wink wink).

     Is there a middle ground where peace can be negotiated? America’s future strength will be in embracing our diversity of viewpoints and endorsing a traditional American Dream. A vision that respects all opinions, not just the ones we like. Opinions are not wrong, they are opinions. Tolerance and freedom would seem to go hand in hand so please reject the Intolerant Minority and embrace our true conservative roots.  

     The squishy soft urban liberal needs to understand the goals of the self-sufficient rural person and both need to respect each other.  “Ewww, you kill it…then eat it…Yuck!” Too many people just squirm when it comes to eating wild meat but find nothing unsavory about how pigs are raised for those babyback ribs they get at TGIFridays. 

           Traditionally in this country, 25% of the population hunted for their meat. The Native Americans and their respectful pursuit of game for thousands of years and then the Yankee farmer and other European settlers. Personally, I squirm when I am eating a life that was tamed and tortured such as chickens, this bothers me a hell of a lot more. The Birds are my brothers. They need to be free. To understand our meat factories and continue to eat the same amount of meat, is to endorse animal cruelty. Jeremy Rifkin suggested in the 70’s that everyone should cut their meat consumption in half. If that simple rule were followed the Amazon would not have been clear cut as it has been jeopardizing the health of the worlds lungs.

                 I would happily eat gator meat or venison if it was sustainably harvested by an unleashed small business effort. There is a new attitude that would have us creating self-sustaining resources with a Capitalist economic system of sustainability. This viewpoint is being articulated, and this will eventually raise awareness.  People hunting for their own food should not be treated the same as someone who kills an unsustainable amount of food, (think tuna)(think rain forests cut down for hamburger), that weakens ecosystems for those who could hunt or would like to purchase wild meat. Gluttonous windfalls of these billion dollar “food” companies is the only concern of predatory Protestant capitalists, not ‘feeding the people’ as they claim. Or feeding people with factory farms or now lab grown meat. A new horror unleashed on us with a happy face. Just stop eating so much goddam meat!

 

     Those exploiting resources need to know Americas future is tied to its land and water resources. Karl Rove and the phony conservatives are eager for an era of unregulated clear cutting of trees with pipes of toxic effluent leading directly into bodies of water, and untrammeled exploration of oil and natural gas fields. This is a sick evil greed we are responsible for by allowing.  Don’t we arrest murderers and bank robbers? There were more bank overdraft fees last year than there was money robbed from banks. Stealing from people who have no money is lower than any criminal activity.

        Maybe conservative conservationist sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I have a role model for the conservative conservationist. His name was Aldo Leopold. In his book, Sand County Almanac, author Leopold writes of his conversion from an exploiter into a respecter and steward of our wild lands. He relates this conversation concerning hunting when he was young in the early 1900’s. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second, we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy... How to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing... When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down and the pup was dragging a leg into the impassable slide rocks.”

     “We reached the wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes; something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would be a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

     “Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of a newly wolf less mountain, and seen the south facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every bush and seedling browsed, first to anaenemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God pruning shears and forbid him all other exercise. I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of

it’s deer.”

       A young hunter with trigger itch eventually becomes the most outspoken advocate of the real value of land up till that time. Leopold was somewhat famous from 1935 to 1955 and he was a thinking mans rustic. He inspired many in their pursuit of conservation ethics and conservatives were in on it at the beginning. Restoration of some of the prairies and preservation of good forests that remain has to be very important to all future prosperity. Let people hunt FFS, but that means ending development in undisturbed areas so populations can grow. Beer and Deer and Turkeys become numerous quickly and here is where humans as apex predators begins. You create abundance and harvest sustainably, instead of stripping the resources bare and leaving behind ravaged local people poisoned watersheds while making sure you are having fancy dinners parties in your Manhattan apartment.

                   There seems to be scare tactics in the media to keep people out of the forests and to marginalize nature as something that is no longer important. Forests and watersheds abused by corporations rightfully belong to all people to enjoy as recreation or to use for hunting sustainable populations of animals. 

     There is an excess of 20 million deer in the United States and the alligator population is not endangered and would yield quite a few tons of meat. I propose a giant hunting park in the everglades where you can take home what you find, and a place where nuisance alligators can be taken. As much as I like bears there are rapidly growing populations in many states. More for the survivalists, bear fat is useful for many things.

                                                                                                                

           I got a feeling though that there’s a propaganda effort going on to scare people about the wild lands. Deer ticks, cougars, grizzlies, West Nile Virus and many other scary aspects to the outdoors we continually read or hear. I propose that conservatives and libertarians abandon their venom spewing extremes and take a stand on the real extreme, and embrace another mysterious conspiracy. Why is the U.S. government and our scientific resources trying to scare people from the national parks? Our wild lands keep us free. It’s because Republicans hope that you all stop going to the National Forests so this way they can buy it and strip them clean. 

 

                Mining companies and cattle barons have waited so long to completely own the land, because they used the hell out of it as if they did own it. Now they want the rest of it.  Never mind that people will be turned away at parks this summer and these National Parks are mostly full of visitors and the government isn’t putting the money where it should as we spend way too much on war, and precious little on recreation.  But to facilitate the enjoyment by quite a few Americans of our National Park System, unfortunately, we can only talk about adding millions in federal budgets. War has become more important than recreation, subverting our “pursuit of happiness.”                                                                        

We are becoming too modern. Too sophisticated. Too smart. Pilotless drones killing people. War is not really normal human behavior anymore, wouldn‘t you say? Yet now we kill so cleanly. No one has to see blood. Time to evolve and stop sending the healthiest off to die overseas. Sphere’s of influence need to be in place. Europe, India, China, Australia and others need to step up to the plate with organized relief efforts in their sphere of influence, and an authentic effort to end war.

         It was conservatives that finished the American Revolution.  The Liberals of that era wanted freedom, but with a managed liberty facilitated by royalty, and they were ready to make our first president a king; called King George (Washington). It was the original G.W. that said, ”A government is like fire. A handy servant but a dangerous master“. The Libertarian Patriots would have no part of that. Conservatives said, gather in Philadelphia, and let’s get down to some business and create a libertarian type of freedom for the individual and to shield every American from religious zealots and their invisible friend that allegedly wrote the Bible.

 Is it any wonder that in polls, preachers are rated very low along with car salesman for trustworthiness as they were in 1776 on a par with the snake oil salesman.

I am neither liberal nor conservative and I made up the phrase “Independent Majority” to describe many of us. Conservatives have corrupted the meaning of the word, conservative, and Liberal was not derived from the word liberty. In the Revolutionary Era, liberals had a reputation for siding with totalitarians and royalty.

 

       In the 60’s, liberals became associated with liberty and civil rights, a traditionally conservative viewpoint and an offshoot of the Progressive Era who were represented by conservative conservationist Theodore Roosevelt (Republicans take note). Liberals were disturbed by the mad devouring industrial machine and the need for full civil rights for all people. Liberals also stewarded laws to reduce and slow down air and water pollution by the greedy corporations and thusly, the Liberals modernized themselves. The land and air should belong to the people, not a waste bucket for the Protestant profiteers, even Richard Nixon knew that.              

       The unseen cost of our “prosperity” is the degradation of our prime raw materials---air and water. What about all these 50 year olds dying of various cancers? Maybe they frolicked on lawns poisoned by DDT and WW2 nerve agents. Conservatives can finish this modern age of reform with another Conservative Counter revolution, but the religious wackoes and apologists of the grandiose rich have stolen conservatism.

                Growing crops to keep our trade deficit down has degraded so much land that soil scientists say we have lost 50% of the topsoil we once had. That unseen cost again. Most wealth is illegitimate. Profits of the last 65 years have come at the cost of pesticides in the people and water and half the good topsoil removed. The continuing soil erosion is a result of our cheap food policy. These large acreage farms support tractor and fuel suppliers. They keep the commercial silos in business. They fill that big empty hole where there should be a community with that peculiar form of predatory capitalism that is all about profit and not compassion. Home and farm foreclosures should never happen, the bank will get their thirty years of payments, but there are going to be bumps in the road for everyone.                                                                              

          The large corporate farms cried that their subsidies were an important part of the local economy and the government was not only hurting them but also the community. Wah wah, big tears, they are about commerce not communities. What could replace them?  Why do BIG corporations have a problem with small farms, close communities and independence?

        A conservative should be a steward of the land. Restoring prairie ecosystems and protesting forest destruction since this is how the self-sufficient native Americans and pioneer yeoman used to do it and it should be available today as an option. There should always be enough fish for people to catch and it would be conservative to be an advocate to retain Americas wild lands.                                                    

              Planting trees as windbreaks so the soil does not blow into rivers and streams, restoring the health of trout streams and knocking down dams so Salmon can breed again. Schoolchildren get it. But the so called “greatest generation” never will. Apologists for corporate totalitarianism, the post WW2 generation were the most easily brainwashed group of people ever. Could you convince this younger generation that we need nuclear energy? Not likely. There is only one problem besides annihilation in a meltdown when it comes to a nuclear site.  We need to store radioactive materials for 10,000 years, not to mention the 50 billion needed for each plant to be decommissioned in the near future. All these ideas for energy creation but the best one would be conservation. Not being spoiled Americans.                                                                                  

           Nuclear power fuel costs were lower for the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s but now  400 generations will need to inspect, reject, object and hire 10,000 years worth of people to keep an eye on the radioactive poison that was created. The unseen cost; as we hope for no leakage problems for thousands of years. But money is so important, the nuclear industry is trying to subtly brainwash people to think that it’s okay. Our friend the atom. Yes the kids get it. They get what the creator was trying to do. Maintain a balance of life. When you kill frogs you get flies. Let’s fill in more wetlands! Birds have confronted so many poisons in the last 60 years that their populations have been halved with the most beautiful and interesting birds suffering the most.  Knock down more trees or plow the prairies to cultivate it to create a monoculture of 5,000 acres of wheat. To ship overseas.                  

What are big farmers giving to America? Taxes? Hopefully. At what cost? The tilled acreage may have contained 50 animal species and 400 plant species. The prairie ecosystem was a deeply rooted mix of low growing plants; numerous grasses and small shrubs and a wide variety of perennials. The prairies were a very unique set of ecosystems that dominated the central United States and now only 3% remains, while greed mongers have profited from the destruction of the other 97% that have been cultivated. Most wealth is illegitimate.

 

            It takes 10 pounds of corn feed to make one pound of beef. (Cow muscle and fat.)   Instead of one beef patty you could have 10 corn muffins. Beef needs steroids and antibiotics. Veal is raised in cruel conditions. The world has decided that eating animals is important and Beef in general is grown as if they were tomatoes or peppers, where has respect for all life gone to? Oh yeh, Manifest Destiny and the belief that God wants us to use up Nature for profits. Trust me, you can be a conservative and be a vegetarian. Beef doesn’t have to be for dinner as the cattle growers continue to destroy ecosystems. Manly men are just looking so stupid right now.

           Richard Hofstadter is my favorite author. He’s able to sum up the Midwestern culture in one long complex sentence, He said, "If a rural culture means an emotional and craftsman-like dedication to the soil, a traditional and pre-capitalist outlook, a tradition directed instead rather than career directed type of character, and a village community devoted to ancestral ways  then the prairies and plains never had one.”  Those college professors sure can construct some convoluted sentences. But do you see what he means Vern?  It became about profits. The heart and soul torn out of the community replaced with the bottom line greed of the Predatory Capitalists. Globally these corporations are doing the same thing to small farmers everywhere. The Predatory Capitalist Dream is to have everyone grow for one store and foreclose on every home they can to erode our freedom and independence. Everyone paying rent to vicious and pernicious corporations. Corporate fascism, as long as people got alot of stuff to fill their busy life they will follow any law.

 

      I’m trying to answer the oft asked but never quite completely answered question, can a conservative be a conservationist? Hell yes, a real conservative would be in favor of restoring the prairies more to what it was. Remnants and fragments are being saved and enhanced in many areas but all todays conservatives can do is whine and complain about environmentalists. Many of us are Green Social Conservatives. Sometimes we don’t know where we fit. Maybe we have abandoned too much of the past. Going back to Thomas Jefferson’s time, Hofstadter wrote this about the yeoman farmer, “Making at home almost everything he needed, buying little, using each year but a pocketful of cash, he would be independent of the marketplace as he was the favor of others." As rural people could be today. But they’re chickenshit. “Can’t stop progress.”

     It is ridiculous to have these giant fields of crops that are exported for the profits of the mega farmer. People drive by these farms with their wave after wave of corn or wheat or something, then remark how marvelous a sight like this is. It’s not it’s not. The Prarie ecosystem was priceless. But to a growing number of people who read about the prairie ecosystem, they can only imagine what was lost. Just a few hundred years ago there was an ecosystem here, with bugs and bees and birds and flowers and buffaloes and a sustainable population of game animals. Taken back 200 years you would also note how large and marvelous the native prairie once was and you would support its preservation and replanting.

 

     So take your fundamentally independent or conservative or libertarian viewpoints and take a good look at what humans are doing to the creators fine work. You may as well snatch the hat off of the God and Goddess and take a crap in it because that’s how we are treating this marvelously working planet. Conservatives have become apologists for big business. The worst of them wear bow ties and are editors of college newspapers. These neo-con phonies need to go.

     Another fine writer I enjoy is Peter Drucker. He died recently at 95 and he wrote more than just about business which he was well known for. Here’s what he wrote about the Revolutionary era Patriots in his book from 1942, The Future of Industrial Man. “In the first place, while conservative, they did not restore nor intend to restore. They never did idealize the past: and they had no illusions about the present in which they lived. They knew that the social reality had changed. They would never have conceived their task as anything but the integration of the new society on the basis of the old principles: never would they have countenanced any attempt to undo what had happened.

     It is their unconditional refusal to restore which has made the founding fathers appear radical, and which has obscured the essentially conservative character in their work. Their social analysis was indeed radical, extremely radical. They never accepted the polite conventions or the wishful restorative dreams which were based on the assumption that the old society was still functioning. The founding fathers of America were conservative of the present and future.”

The observations of our founding fathers looking at todays world would be ‘too much technology’ and ‘what are you doing fighting a war on the other side of the world?’ They would also say, “Too bad 21^st century people don’t love the earth the same way they love money”. No wonder kids rebel, they don’t want to spend their life in cubicle hell, another brick in the wall, a cog in the consuming machine. Watching the planet go to hell and the mean people having all the power. They are searching for a way to make their life meaningful and many of them are finding ways. Their lives can too easily become formulaic and they are easy prey for todays phony conservatives. Venom spewing rage at liberals brainwashed even to kill liberals. They are literally trained mad dogs.

     The 1600’s may have been one of those “golden moments” in American economic history. Like today, there were just a lot of regular people, like us, who only have a minimal impact on society. Working hard, trying to do right by society and trying to keep children happy and healthy, and not really giving a crap about giving hard earned money to organized religion!

     The agrarian world of the independent farmers and their families became a threat and by 1700 the religious leaders and the royalty saw a need to curb this independence in the American colonies. In 1639 an important document, the Fundamental Orders, had been written. It  declared that all political power was derived from the “free consent of the people”.

 

     Well, this was not to be tolerated by the ruling elite. People took care of a lot of their needs themselves, but the left over issues were solved at the monthly town meetings and this was decentralized government at its finest. Also the neighboring natives, particularly the Iroquois and Mohawk, had systems of peaceful self-government, though I mention elsewhere how they were mean to peaceful woodland tribes. No one back then could have imagined the gargantuan waddling monster of a government it became and it builds like a coral colony with every new special interest with a gripe.           

The Libertarian conservative and the anarchic green fringe is trying to funnel this government power back down to state, county and local government, eventually leading to states taking care of education, state roads and other functions. In a truly civilized world there will not be a need for this intrusive government and The Greens particularly have solutions that will eventually have us taking care of ourselves.  

     I last lived in New England in the 80’s.  In 1984 I moved away from Arizona because I yearned for New England again. Leaving the laid back, c’est la vie attitude of Tucson, it was back to the land of material yearning; Cuisanarts, cars, curtains and children’s private school. I moved for the quaintness, history and diversity of opinions and to observe recovering wild lands. Living north of the busy Hartford County area, I ventured back one day to see my quaint little hometown of Wethersfield, Connecticut in southern Hartford County.                                      

In the War on the Trees the developers were winning everywhere I visited. How about some access to a park with a lot of trees? The town has 15 drug stores but no wild lands. All that was left was the meadows where I had a lot of adventures as a youth>>> or I could go to the Green. 300 years old and it wasn’t going anywhere. In just 10 years the younger trees seemed to have grown a lot and none of the old trees seem to have died. I loved the giant beech trees. 50 years of names carved into the trunk seem to have done no harm. Jogger’s biker’s, strollers & walkers and benches to accommodate the crowds.

 

     But what about peace and quiet? I drove around town to the old spots, but the only quiet place was Ye Anciente graveyard. Headstones dating back to 1680. Even the ghosts have moved on. Unfortunately, the noise from the Interstate Highway, Rt. 91, was constantly droning.

          In the 1600's, pioneers built their houses from trees in the forest. The “elite minority” followed their roughhewn footsteps of the first westward moving pioneers as they left Boston and Plymouth to settle in river valleys; particularly the Connecticut River and the Hudson. These pioneers eventually reached the Appalachian Mountains. With virtually no government, there was agrarian freedom, it was virtually anarchy. Agrarian Anarchy. Trade, barter and self-sufficiency greased the wheels of society. Today, can this type of freedom be replicated without the nonsense of religion that ruin that century?  Or the pinhead accountants that say it’s not possible.

     Developer delirium will always dwarf agrarian anarchy unless the good people advocate and implement changes. Future generations will puzzle over the recklessness of 20^th century people allowing forests to be leveled as they were. I’ve mostly lived “outside of town”.  In Hazardville Connecticut I was in a house surrounded by 200 acres of corn and a couple hundred acre shrub farm. Then a cul de sac was built. Great for property values but the trucks would speed around the corner, sand piles built up and gravel flung all over the road. Here in Florida, they dig out ancient sand ridges to built one new house after another. that boom recently collapsed.

       This constant rapid growth can’t be good for ecological balance. Agrarian anarchy is the antithesis of parasitical capitalism. Agrarian Anarchy asks the question, “What is better, 700 farmers, truckers, small store owners and others making 40,000 dollars a year or one “export executive” Making 10 million dollars? That one executive is somehow as valuable as an entire small community who actually produce goods? Look for the holes in this Predatory Capitalist system we have now and rid ourselves of these white collar parasites and that 10 million dollars could be divided among people who actually work.

-2-9-LIBERTARIANS                                        

“trust is the essence of anarchy”

         

              The Blue Ridge Parkway is a marvel of engineering, construction, recreation, and conservation. Very limited signage like “overlook ahead” or “Pine knob 3728 ft.”, and no stop lights for 469 miles.

          Long after I left Pilot Mountain in North Carolina, I realized the GPS voice was bringing me to Dalton Campground in Virginia, and not Doughton Campground near Sparta, North Carolina, so I turned and went went southwest and got on the Parkway eventually, and began to search for a place to camp out. When I got to Doughton Campground, I fell in love with site #77 and stayed for 6 days of a 16-day vacation.  

        

          When I first got there, three choppers roared by at eye level after they were leaving the disaster area that was the North Carolina coast after Hurricane Florence.  Even Interstate 95 got washed out. I was ready to expect the unexpected. The Blue Ridge Parkway had only opened two days previous in North Carolina after trees were cleared from the road. Sawdust everywhere and trunks in piles by the side of the road.  There’d been a bear in the park recently too, so I decided to sleep in my rented Jeep. 

          I was able to set up and get a fire going as a light sprinkle and occasionally the setting sun filtering through the trees. This was a chance to truly relax because the last mountain I saw was Stone Mountain in Georgia ten years previous. I enjoy Florida’s great weather but it is as flat and green as people say it is. I had a moment of Zen listening to the many bird calls and crickets as nightfall approached and I sat with my eyes closed at the picnic table. Releasing my troubles to the breeze, I closed my eyes.

                 Boom! Boom! Boom! 
          It’s the Balrog! Beezledoom!

               Out of my comfort zone, I sat up startled till I realized was just a drum circle over in area B, and it was a welcome addition to the night noise of birds or crickets.

 

                 There was also a squeaky, metallic thumping noise that I disregarded at first. By nightfall no one else had parked in the entirety of Area C. I had that whole further section of the campground to myself since people weren’t traveling the Parkway. I couldn’t believe my luck!

           Later on, I went to the bathroom to see what there was and there it was again, gears gnashing…a loud mechanical noise... Invasion from Mars?  Were Robots clambering up the side of the knob I was camping at?  Later after walking to the bathroom to rinse off the days dirt and grime, I realized it was a water pump.  

          It was an excellent bathroom with sinks of course and a water spigot about a foot above the floor, for taking a French shower or whatever cleanup you had to do. No lights in the building but a solar powered light outside so you could see the place on a foggy night.    

 

 

         Then I got to wonderin,' how would a Libertarian get hundreds of gallons of water a day to this remote bathroom?  The bathroom is a sacred place when you're camping for a couple of days.  The short answer is, they wouldn’t.

          They wouldn’t build a campground that every day working class people could afford.  These are the kind of people who objected to a Postal Service that would deliver to every single house in this country, so people could stay in touch and important communications could happen for all times within our borders. Oh no, privatize it. Delivery trucks zooming by every day instead of a predictable delivery time and complete system the USPS has.
Before that, they objected to bringing electricity to rural areas. 
The skint bastards that squeeze a penny so hard, it makes Lincoln cry.

                Some years ago a rich dude built a road to the top of Mount Mitchell and I checked it out towards the end of the vacation. Bosses could afford the fee to the top and were also the first to have automobiles back in 1927 when this road opened. In time the state of North Carolina came in, and developed the services necessary that would allow everyone to enjoy the views from the Majestic Mt. Mitchell. At 5500 feet a sub alpine habitat suddenly emerges  on the summit drive and for me from toomuchfloridausa, it seemed to be another world.
               Now I’m not a fan of big government, but I enthusiastically applaud the effort of the Democratic Socialists at that time that built such a remarkable road and often at heights of 3000 feet or more where cold arrives early.  The area is nearly unspoiled, and the Blue Ridge Parkway may be the last hope for the wild things in the Appalachians.

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3527770500165648686/3251569805827573606           Libertarians don’t think much about “the blessings of Liberty” or “the pursuit of happiness” unless it’s for themselves. We need a government to cover the basics so there is less suffering among its people, and at least food and shelter for everyone. It wouldn’t cost that much. Just have a moratorium on building new jets or tanks. Sell a couple of embassies and military bases in places where the United States doesn’t belong.    Social Security extended the lives of millions of seniors but they are still grousing about it.

           The Park Service needs to double its budget, and you know, sell a tank or something. Reduce the CIA by 25%.  What about supply and demand GOP? We demand recreation but are supplied with war instead.  A country by the frat boys, for the frat boys, and of the frat boys. Stop giving rich senators their Agricultural subsidies, their million-dollar paychecks for not growing crops. There are many ways to starve the beast called Oligarchy. To save America we have to save the land along with the liberty and justice for all that the essentials.

 Then I got to thinking about Pilot Mountain that I had visited the day before, and I wondered how the Libertarians would manage that park. The sign that says: hikers below, do not throw rocks. Gone, that’s no fun being careful and courteous. The no alcohol in the Park directive? That's a silly Liberal rule by sissy men of today. “How do you like your steak sir,” the waiter asked. “Next to my other steak” was the reply from the macho posturing pinhead. 

 

Fences that prevent people from falling down the cliff would never get fixed. There’d be drinking parties “We have to go kids; the Libertarians are here.”  They’d be shooting the crows that use the mountain for resting, after gliding and hunting.  Learn what is good government and what is bad government.  

We can certainly reduce our military to 500 billion a year and dramatically increase mass transportation for everyone here in the homeland. We can have small-home villages for the homeless and the rarely homed or the nearly homeless, and create many more recreation areas, so people with homes can get out once in a while, and out into Nature. A place to stay for people living out of their cars.

 

I can’t say enough about the Doughton Campground and how it is laid out.  I had 100 acres of mature trees and steep slopes on three sides to enjoy. I didn't need to travel for hiking. I prefer, off the trail stuff where I won't get lost and lose my bearings. For someone stuck in Florida for 12 years, even a nearby naturally flowing streamlet was enjoyed immensely by me. Remarkable preservation along the whole Parkway was gratifying to see. Truly the ultimate forest experience for someone like me who doesn't want to hike 6 miles to get a view.

The network of roads at Doughton Campground is organized and not filled with signs for the idiots, as is the entire Blue Ridge Parkway.  I didn’t see any police or ambulances or fire trucks either in 6 days. I can’t imagine what the Rhododendrons that hang over the road are like in the spring.  Breathtaking falls short in describing The Blue Ridge Parkway, and that is what I’m thinking about when I try to imagine what a large infrastructure project would look like. Build it and they will come.

Bloodthirsty libertarian predators are ready to buy up the rest of America that isn’t nailed down. They made out with the banking crisis of 2008, and they bought up many of the 10 million foreclosed homes. That's how Bill O'reilly got his 78 houses. Super predators brainwashed by Milton Friedman and others with the Chicago School of Oligarchy.

Ecosystem health is an important issue, and the corporate naming of the parks is the worst idea I have ever heard. Conservative cranks want to sell off the parks but I say sell off military bases and embassies instead, and stop selling weapons to prop up dying capitalist and communist systems.    -the end-

 

 

-2-10-blogspot version 7-2-22

  “The founding revolutionaries excoriated and eviscerated religions creepy grasp on the 

      VITAL ENERGY OF DEMOCRACY, 

when they started the United States.”
a)  The Sky is Falling

b)  The Vital Energy of Democracy

c)   The is no religion in the marketplace

d)   Dog Whistles

e)    Donut Shop Pundits

f)   Who are the White People?

g)   Intractable Dilemma

h)   The Meek are now the Enlightened
                           

    
           Here we go, we're buckled in and the ride into the future has started. You can go numb and pretend nothing is happening, or participate in the fun we are going to have making history and invalidating injustice.
                         ↯
                       

          If the Constitution of the United States were embedded in all our hearts, this secret world of surveillance and spying would not exist. In addition, these unconstitutional foreign wars wouldn't have wasted safety net and infrastructure money. 
      What we have had since World War Two is right-wing authoritarianism run amok with American foreign policy. Then we have capitalist opportunism gone wild and running roughshod on the domestic economy crushing all the small markets. 

        Amoral Chicken Hawks getting your kids to fight in their paranoid wars since WW2. A viewing public has been brainwashed with repetitive commercials, but these consumers are beginning to see where they were misled.

      Meanwhile, numerous countries in the Middle East have been bombed into rubble, much to the delight of those with stocks in American bomb-making facilities. Lookin' at you Boomers.

                

 

        Regime change in Libya was abhorrent in my view, and it's why I could not find any enthusiasm for Hillary in 2016. Nobody could, she couldn’t even attract a disinterested cynicism and was in favor of a war of any sort. There was also a clotted nothingness to her, not to mention the bill baggage. How did we end up with two international crooks as the best two candidates that year has been my question?
          There was the corporate invasion of Iraq which proceeded for 13 years with virtually no antiwar effort, once the wars began. Therefore, in 2009 as the wars droned on, Obama appeased the right wingers by keeping up with their wars. If he had quickly wound down the two wars after becoming president, the rest of his presidency would have been all about what a coward he was. How he couldn't stand up to terrorism.  

          This is how the GOP works, even after 13 years, members of the GOP say we should still be in Iraq. Hedging their bets on many issues, getting nothing done.  Both parties thinking it was all right staying in Afghanistan for 16 years and these politicians and the warrior elites have spent ungodly amounts of money as war without end became popular.                    Boomers appreciated how well their war stocks were doing, "Space Program," their broker told them.
           President Obama somehow got his footing in the quicksand of Republican incontinence, and he salvaged George "Cheney" Bush’s wars, acting more like a republican than a republican. I called Obama the best republican president since Eisenhower and Obama is sometimes called George Bush the Third for, "engaging terrorists on the battlefield instead of in the homeland."  Where is the party for peace? 300 million guns and we can't protect ourselves.

            Some white people seem obsessed with cleanliness and order, especially order. As my Facebook bio says, "White people have become sociologically inbred with their faith in authoritarian excess."  Unless it's a test range for bombs and weapons, then hell, the messier the better.         ⇛    ⇒ 

Show them who's boss.

                                                                                ↠ 

          As a youth, I would often note "Columbus didn't discover anything," and I would add, "the Indians were already here." People actually responded with, “ you know, the first civilized people." I call this benighted behavior, 'donut shop punditry'. " These bile spewing haters are turning out to be far more dangerous than supposed, and their verbal bilge more prevalent than most people realized. 
          There haven’t been many people as deeply and severely critical of white people as me in many of my past essays, and conversations with people about it. Therefore, I am going to tackle the white supremacy problem prepared for disagreements from all sides, because this is one of those volatile and polarizing issues we can't talk about. 

      2022 ed. note Conniving hucksters on both sides pushing their agenda while Independents attempt to find a consensus. 20% are conservatives and 20% identify as Liberal which leaves 60% as independents and if these independents voted, the right or the left wouldn't be fighting for a majority. The Independents would be a majority     dont you get it ,independents who vote by the issue, not the party line. Why is our news about whose got the most votes? 

➽ a}   THE SKY IS FALLING

          Trust me; there are scarier aspects to this whole alt-right problem that people don't even see yet. First of all, as I update this piece a bit, what has happened in 2017-9 is white MALE supremacy. I'm trying to put a fresh perspective on this issue and I want to help us all understand how to read between the lines with these people. These red hats who speak in riddles and dog whistles. All they have are vulgarisms and terrorism. Nothing for workers or families or markets in poor areas. 
         "Are you a white supremacist?" is the question that popped up in the break room one day. In the mind of the White Nationalist he is thinking that he is a white MALE supremacist, which is different, so he says no and this is one way they avoid answering direct questions, and this is how they lie in your face. They lie to themselves first.

 

               Who are these white people, and is it worth the time to refute their walls of fallacious arguments?  They bombard good facebook pages with nonsense. They got their screwy fanaticism and flag fetishism. If protestors come up their driveway they are ready to mow them all down.

            Their evolving coup of the United States government is 40 years in the making, even 60 years going back to the founding of the JBS. John Birch Society. I trace it back even to 1946, 75 years ago, and the Nazis who were pardoned and brought into our government as our foreign policy became rooted in the fear of communism instead of the actual threat. Creeping Naziism. 

          Stupid Bigly forced their hand, and today in 2020 we have apparatchiks encouraging t***p to declare Martial Law. 

             Misguided and motivated, Christian militants in the early 80's announced their plans to "put as many Apocalypticists as possible in the military and police." They are yearning for Armageddon, and you have to wonder if there is some mental illness at work here. Maybe even demon possession. 

           "No one can know the time" said a Pentacostal girlfriend referring to the Second Coming...."but soon," she assured me back in 1976. I have to drive by a church in 2022 with its "Jesus is Coming" sign. Something is wrong here. 
              Back then, I would point out to people that ... intending to create Armageddon via our military was Treason. "Aw they're not serious." So, there I was, "the sky is falling" again. T***p moves the embassy to Jerusalem because the evangelicals told him it was prophecy.   

              Fox News is the ultimate KKKool-aid and brainwashing tool for far too many white people. Mind control candy. GOP politicians are probably the most despicable demographic going, but, on the other side, the cultural appropriation nonsense needs to be dealt with also. 

 

          All those gender issues that the city slicker liberals have gotten themselves mired in, that rural people could really give a shit less about, have stolen the narrative. Hard fought, pyrrhic victories while the rich get richer and most of the rest of us are now leading lives of quiet desperation. The middle class has shrunk from 60% of the population to 30%. 

            Battles that shouldn't have to be fought were it not for the snowflake conservatives and their moral high ground hypocrisy. Marraige equality? Check the Constitution. Americans have the ninth Amendment to protect themselves from the regressive ideocracy that is emerging.

 

          On the other hand, I am at my wit's end trying to understand what I can and can’t do with this extreme City Slicker Liberal agenda. There are so many things I can't talk about any more, and not just the Polish jokes.

💚

 

    Either way, if we play this right we can uproot the neo-conservative and neo-liberal people in power.

 The dingleberries clinging by a hair to their illegitimate authority. The congealing Oligarchy guiding the hapless peasants who only know how to obey. 

               I know the American Constitution has all the freedoms that I love, but I am also the last person who wants to insult someone about their culture. One of my kin picks up a shirt from Africa and then she has to worry about offending someone when she wears it back here in Florida? How crazy is that?

 

             Independent thinking people are beginning to be concerned about this dumbed down mob rule. Political correctness needs me to identify with “my” cultural group instead of considering myself, a… global citizen?   One problem for me is that I've been appropriating Yoga for over 45 years now and I am absolutely in shock that I have been insulting people by appropriating their culture! 
                      Do I follow “white” customs only now? Am I white enough though, to do an Irish jig? Did you know "paddy" is a slur against Irish people! It never ends, all these slurs and insults. 

         What can I dress my child up as for Halloween with all this noise about cultural appropriation? This is how this whole thing started. 

          Am I white enough to drink tea at Tea Time without insulting someone? Political correctness is like six million band aids when just a bit of surgery is what is needed. Honesty surgery to the body politic. Out of many...one. UNITED states. United people. god has nothing to do with it.

                    Would my southern Mediterranean self be insulting the pasty white northerners from England and Ireland if I appropriate their customs?  Am I the right kind of white? Is there a wrong kind of white? Holy shit, I'm getting confused! 
                   What if my DNA profile shows I’m from Egypt or India? Quite a few people thought my dad looked like Anwar Sadat and I look like my dad. The point I am going to try to make is that some of us are going to use whatever we damn well please from whatever culture we want to. 

                    "Life is tough, get a helmet" Dennis Leary.  
                 

 

                     
               B}   THE VITAL ENERGY OF DEMOCRACY
         One prism of understanding the American Constitution is when you can comprehend why we don't put the Ten Commandments on court building walls, as fervent christian zealots want. As I said before, the founding revolutionaries excoriated and eviscerated religions creepy grasp on the VITAL ENERGY OF DEMOCRACY in the United States. Clergy has been coercive for five hundred years in America, and forced conversion has been normalized. 
             The Founding Documents is where the actual spirit of Liberty was born. The Founding Revolutionaries were most decidedly in favor of the separation of church and state, and Liberty was the Vanguard of the Revolution, not the bible. Jefferson showed his scorn for the clergy by making a Jesus Bible that deleted all the miracles but kept the common sense kindness. 

 

           The one constant that all the founding revolutionaries believed, was that religion was too often a corrupting influence on government, and they were determined to keep the clergy at arm’s length in this new country they eventually called The United States.         Freedom of religion was to protect YOU, from ANY coercive majority religion. The forced conversions of islam and christianity was foremost in the FOUNDERS thoughts with the bloodthirsty Ottoman Empire actively rampaging, and the Christian Inquisition still in the news in the late 1700's when the American Revolution occurred.
          It could be Quakers or Hindus 500 years from now. No  religion, period, insisted the Founding Revolutionaries. 

                  EVER! 

         This was truly on their minds as the founding documents were drawn up. No invisible ruler in the United States. End of story.

Careful Joe, could be a bomb in that collar

 

 

Capitalism has failed the world and depleted it's resource base.

 

                I don't want police cars to say In God we Trust. I don’t want them to say In Allah we Trust either, a hundred years from now, or in Krishna we trust three hundred years from now, if you get what I’m saying. When our gracious islamic brothers and sisters want to kneel and pray 5 times a day at work or in the public commons, I have every right to object to this practice. because I think banning prayer in the common spaces would be covered by the Ninth Amendment which is guided by judicial precedence. 

               Your constitutional rights end where mine begin. Keep your prayers in your pants and don't wave them around in public. Hey, I can pray five times a day too, and I guarantee you, it is disconcerting to hear my freedom of religion because I pray to my Metal Gods at full volume.  
              Guess what? The best way to keep Sharia Law out of this country is to keep Biblical Law out of our Laws and Statutes and Ordinances. Take “In God We Trust” off our money, for crying out loud. Stop forcing politicians to use the Bible, for Christs sake, for oath swearing, are you kidding me? We are not one nation under god.  We are many united as one.  Sharia Law can only gain a foothold  if knucklehead republicans insist on encoding Biblical Law. Leave shit alone! You Lost to the Secular Enlightenment.

My thing is that we aren't colors, genders,                    

                                             or nationalities. Instead, think of all of us as workers, voters, citizens, and children. Uniting as workers would be a simple thing but no one is doing it. Wait, hold my beer.

 

 

               

          Before this foray into the white people controversies, I want it known I love everybody. Well, not really. There's a meme that goes "somebody out there loves you. Not me, but somebody must."  
           Vanishing cultures around the world say, "Hey we had a fine system here before Columbus came along; didn't need y'all."   

      Tens of millions of Native Americans died from smallpox and other diseases brought by the POS conquistadors in the 1500's, even before Virginia was invaded in 1609 by the British. 
              Colonialism by rich white people proceeded once the European Commons was absconded with, (it takes money to make money), and then Industrial Capitalism came along and that destructive system has disrupted virtually every culture in the world since. Consumed the Market Socialism that had controlled commerce. 

            Common area street markets that were free to use, there were mom and pop shops that knew their customers and household industry producing the necessities of life in every community had worked with varying degrees of success since time immemorial and provided what was needed without filling our dumps and oceans with plastic trash and rusted bilge.
              In years past, most white people were tyrannized by a local despot such as a Prince Priest or Duke that parasitized off their industrious labor.   
                 It's always been this sick strain of dogmatic religiosity and the notorious implementation of Manifest Destiny, that fueled this global empire. The gleeful clergy worm tonguing their way to power and influence. 

 

          Poor people inventing things, and the already rich making the profits. The workers revolution is a long time coming.
            



        
            Europe was Pagan and White and Africa was Pagan and black for 30,000 years. Eventually, Mecca became a great Pagan meeting place for polytheists of all colors to commingle, and there was no religion in that marketplace because Pagans didn't have wars over the gods and goddesses.  

        Religious people say the Pagans were corrupt and lawless during that period in Mecca before Mohammad.  Read that as, having fun.  Remember that Islam and Christianity basically started in the same neighborhood. These were crazy brown people getting all violent with the heat 'n shit. They became established near Jerusalem,  Mecca and Constantinople. THEN those crazy brown bastards invaded White Pagan Europe and Black Pagan Africa. 

 

             Back to this cultural appropriation nonsense. Culture is as important as climate and the two will clash, collide and confront. So I ask myself, what is my culture? I find out I cannot have Dreads, hunt seals, or be a Buddhist monk or any of the 6,000 other things that non-whites do.  

 

         We cannot appropriate the customs of other cultures willy-nilly, say neo-liberal totalitarians, or we risk being publicly chastised and ostracized, it seems. The Liberal PC crowd is brainwashing its minions by saying white people have to like only white people stuff, or be prepared to be corrected. Don't insult other cultures by copying their traditions, is the basis of the scolding. 
           Trying to run through the swamp here, just keep going. Don't get bogged down. 'Nobody is right if everybody is wrong'. Peace.

          My favorite religious practice that I have found inspirational is a Pagan religion from Lithuania. It’s called Romuva today, but this ancient folk religion has ALWAYS been there as folk tradition, and importantly, Lithuania was the last European country to be christianized. Pagan traditions survived.
                  On Romuva forums though, I find out that they don’t want to know you, if you are not Lithuanian. I can't be authentic in their eyes, you know? Same thing with Native Americans and Nordic Pagans. They want to see blood.
                      Natives and Nordics often also similarly believe they are reincarnated within their family clan. But eternal skeptic that I am, if I say to someone that reincarnation couldn't possibly occur within a family or clan, people get miffed, they don't want to hear it.  
                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ZqZVunCb4

I have been attracted to Northern European Pagan traditions, but have lived in the warmer part of the United States for half my life, in USDA zone nine(Soon zone 10 with global warming) but these Northern European rituals are not quite relevant for southern climates when our planting season starts in October and ends in May.  
          My thing is about bringing these northern European traditions down south and translating them into USDA zone 9/10 kind of stuff. Traditions that white, (read that not christian) Pagans had before the brown christians and brown islamics invaded Europe, is what I am trying to discover. 
                   The indigenous Europeans and Africans got invaded the same way the North American indigenous people got invaded, but historians won't point that out to you. it's all rah rah rah! Victory over savages. This is one of those hidden truths, their lies of omission. Pagans were slaughtered, their sacred places buried or destroyed by these invading brown hordes. These lunatic brown barbarians and their crazy religions, xlam and xianity. 

NONE OF THE APOSTLES WERE WHITE, Remember? ffs

           Before all that mess, there was the kind prophet from the Essene People nearly 2,000 years ago. He was an anomaly at the time, preaching about peace and freedom and being good to our neighbors and shit, and this is why Jesus became a viral celebrity after his death or disappearance.⇎  People were digging it and hidden by historians, is the nature of Jesus' early followers.
           Back then, the people were generally sick of all the coercion and bullshit rules they had to live by with Judaic Law and the, generally fair but randomly brutal and indiscriminate Pagan Roman rules.                    

          

        Patriarchal forms of Christianity kept wedging themselves into the circle of truths discussed by Jesus and, eventually, they stole the vitalness of his energy as the years rolled on. Jesus was esteemed by women and slaves who were the early christians along with the other downtrodden in society. The peaceful Essenes were his people. The Essenes refused to slaughter animals, live, in the common market for instance. The Essenes were also reputed to be vegetarians.
           In years after the One died, the Gnostics believed in only Jesus, and they proclaimed that the old testament god was an imposter. A Poser. It became a  battle between the energetic Gnostics and the Patriarchal Paulines, but the Gnostics got snitched out and outmaneuvered by the Paulines. 

            The Gnostics were the christians who were thrown thrown to the Lions because the Paulines privately outed them to authorities. Christians killing their own by 200 A.D. 

            Here is where it gets dicey for me. I would like to ask, what in the heck IS white culture? We know we can’t say it. Can’t have a White television channel, that's ra’ist, right?  So if I want to say I am extolling the best of what white culture could possibly be, that’s ra'ist once again. What is white culture anyhow, and how come I can't talk about it? How is it everyone else has a culture and I don't? 

            For that matter, I'm not a vet, or a biker, or a Rotarian, or affiliated with any group. I'm a UU, that's true. Thank God for them. 
           It seems that we can no longer even talk about white culture because the discussion of it is ra'ist and this is what the regular working folks are puzzled and pissed about. Everybody else exulting and exalting their particular cultures while white people have to shut the hell up because white culture represses all cultures. 😒

             Conservatives think black lives matter has charged the general atmosphere with racial division, when it is the patriarchal white system that has been sick for hundreds of years with the gangrenous pus of discrimination, division and exclusion, and the wounds that never heal. 
          Academia’s politically correct city slicker liberal says, if we "do things from other cultures, we are stealing from them" and that's how this newly concocted horror of cultural appropriation came to be. 

           Oppressed people laugh and say white culture is genocide and factories.  However, they have yet to explain what white culture is. The Culture Police need to tell me the right way to do things, so you know, email me, you over credentialed eggheads.↭

 

           From bullfighting in Spain, to Greek pottery, to Laplanders and their Reindeer, these are just a couple of the corners of European culture. But wait, my ancestors were from the Azores, and that is a whole 'nother corner of the world, out in the Atlantic. 
         Recent discoveries of pre-Portuguese artifacts has me wondering who had these boats to travel that far, so long ago? The Phoenicians, the Polynesians? The ancient Iberians? Mali in Africa reportedly had an 800 ship Navy that sailed far and wide well before Columbus, so it was probably them or Vikings looking for warmer ports. 
           Don’t know when the original settlers got there, but the Azores are 900 miles out into the ocean, away from Europe. As part of Portugal, it's European, I reckon, and the Portuguese moved there in the 1500's. 
            My kin have been fishing and farming in the Azores for untold generations, and I am going to guess my poor ass peasant ancestors did not profit from the Portuguese slave trade. Chances are a local despot or clergy taxed their harvest bounty however. 

          Going back even further in time, it turns out that Jewish people civilized Portugal about 1500 years ago and gave them a written language, and this was part of the evolution of Portuguese culture. This begs the question, are Jewish customs okay for me to use? Can I dress my child up as a Talmud Scholar on Halloween? Would Jewish people be offended? This whole article started as a Halloween skit. What can the children wear?

Jesus loves all the little hands of the world

           Portugal has seen many migrations of Greek and Egyptian sailors the last 3000 years when it was known as Iberia.  
            So consider this, Portugal is actually closer to Mali in Africa than Norway in Europe. The Azores is closer to New Jersey than Greece. So needless to say I am scratching my head⇟

                I am presumably white, yet the first Mexican to play American Major League Baseball, shared my last name, Mel Almada. Mexicans are brown right, derived from Spain? Spain is closer to Switzerland than The Azores. Therefore people from Spain cannot appropriate culture from Switzerland but I can, because Portuguese people are allegedly white and Spaniards are brown? What? They're not Hispanic? I'm getting confused! 
           Hispanic people can celebrate Cinco de Mayo with it's cultural link to Mexico, but French and Portuguese people cannot since that is cultural appropriation? We need some explanations here. I see this shit on Facebook, everybody yelling at each other and getting nowhere.

 

           But that's what Liberals do. It can be called enlightened despotism, and its their intention that they are doing things for your own good. This is how Democrats absorb every good radical impetus into it's managed maw. Calm down radicals, we got this, say the Democrats, but they have been feckless, ineffectual do nothings who can't stand up to Neo-con bullying.

         Over two decades of feel good, gauzy nothingness. The Democrats  couldn't counter the GOP "Contract on America" in 1995 or the Tea Party buffoons in 2010 and have been mute since, steadily losing governorships and state legislatures. Both major parties are broken down ships unfit for sailing into the future. Like two last  place teams in the world series.

    This is why it has to be third party or bust. ⥁

           South of the Azores are the Madeira Islands that are primarily composed of black people. Further south than that are the Canary Islands whose people were slaughtered into extinction by the Spanish who were freaked out by the very strange people they encountered there and they were immediately compelled to kill them all.  WTF! Canary Island customs and language were barely preserved because of the ferocity of the Spaniards attack. 
               Spaniards were even more freaked out that the Canary Islanders were Brown people and not Black people seeing how far south they were. How could that be? It’s been speculated that the Catalans and Basques and other genetically isolated populations were scattered cultural remnants of Atlantis and were allegedly related to the mysterious Canary Islanders. http://www.ancient-atlantis.com/guanche/  Some say the Canary Islanders  were from a pre-dynastic period in Eygpt.
              Back to the beginning of the story then. What can I dress my child up as for Halloween with all this noise about cultural appropriation?  All these insulted demographics. First, it seems people speaking for American Native Indians are the very most offended by cultural appropriation on  Halloween. They are also the people I most admire so it's quite a conundrum. They've had enough, I get it. 

             But we are warned that  Indian Princess is now out as a costume for Halloween unless you are 1/16th Native American. Or is it 1/8th? So many rules.

I evolved, so can you.

 

 

           Even if the people who cluster-fucked Custer are heroes of mine, I cannot honor their customs? Or do whatever I want with their celebrations and ceremonies? Am I not allowed to use dream catchers or play drums like Native Americans?  Take John Trudell off my Youtube playlists? The Native Americans are the true owners of this continent and my elemental self bonds with their beliefs.
            I can’t call myself Two Crows because I don’t have the genetic heritage? I fully understand that names of great respect are given to people who deserve it, and White Eagle is one such name. 
           When I used to live 15 miles from the O'odham People,  I named my roommate Eagle that Walks with his 30/20 vision, and I was Heap big Four Eyes. You know, who cares.
            One of the funniest notions from the politically correct cultural appropriation police, as I mentioned, is that even Yoga is now cultural appropriation! That's the one that made me realize that they are completely full of shit and my eyes were finally fully opened to this Brainwashing. The traditional stance of Liberals is managed Liberty. They rule us magnanimously “for our own good.” They help the poor for their own good. They imagine they are the salve in a sick world. 
             They will save the environment for the good of the planet they will say, but what they are actually doing is creating six-figure jobs for them and all their friends and eventually, a world regulatory body that a carbon tax would yield.  You send money to preserve habitat and more than half of it goes to an elite white lollygagger and their do-gooder foundation. 

        Recently we've seen that every famous person in Washington has a son or daughter that works in the Ukraine. George Carlin's "its a big club and you're not in it"  becomes more apparent every day. 

 

             Liberals want to create a carbon tax and a sprawling world bureaucracy so their compatriots all have six-figure jobs and their kids will have six-figure jobs as neo-Liberal institutions grow like coral colonies under the guise of saving everything. We have to be independent, we have to create a third party. Community based, general assembly. Call it the Independent  Majority Party. Go ahead steal the idea, as long as independents can start having a say to break u[ the Liberal Conservative logjam.
           The problem is that we have reached the end of the line with managed liberty, enlightened despotism, and cronyism. We actually want anarchy, which is the absence of coercion. 

        We got it now. We know how to shop thriftily and knowledgeably. We are far more discerning now when it comes to what we eat and what we add to our lives. People just know so much more today than they did 50 years ago, so much awareness of many small but important daily issues such as food and hygiene.
             But yoga is cultural appropriation?  I don’t know what my Azorean ancestors did to stretch in the morning, but maybe the exercises were very much like Qi Gong or Yoga in their movements. Unfortunately, I will never know what exercises I am allowed to do because all the records of Azorean exercise have disappeared.  No exercise tradition handed down. 😟
             I am clearly not Chinese so my cheesy reinterpretations of Qi Gong mixed with Yoga are clearly insulting on so many levels. I add light weights and call it Yogaerobics. Life sucks. Get a helmet.
              Meanwhile, what about that Halloween costume? Maybe my child can dress up as a Fish Monger or a Fish Mongers Wife since my children are Portuguese and French. They can rinse some Bacalhau (dried salted Cod), and carry it around since it’s said Portuguese people are able to tolerate the smell of rotting fish better than any other culture. "And what are you little boy?" 
               
             Then across the planet, what happens if some Saudi Arabian mother tells her child at Halloween time that he is not allowed to be a fishmonger since that would be a cultural appropriation from white people. 
                In India, there is a child pleading to his parents. “It is NOT cultural appropriation for me to dress in the style of the ‘Rockabilly culture’. Mother… I INSIST …it is my choice. Please listen to this and tell me you don’t feel the energy. I love Rockabilly!"              
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShZEt7J5RNs&list=PLD1018BBF28138B27&index=7

IT’S ALL RIDICULOUS AND WE KNOW IT.

 Not Rockabilly but all this tight ass whining.

              
               

 

 

         The word is that Newt Gingrich is going to have a new Un-American Activities Committee and there will be money for his goons to investigate private citizens, but hypocritically, none for the Meals on Wheels program.  Thank the gods the Orange Menace is gone.
        The NSA can screen every email that discusses “secession” and you will find yourself under investigation. The white van with the tinted windows down the street listening to what you are talking about. (Heads up: they ditched the obvious and hot black vans.)
           The FBI doing a background check on your son, taking pictures with their glasses cam. "Has he ever said anything bad about America?"
           But right-wing deplorables go yeehaw whenever someone talks about Texas secession, so it would seem to me that we could talk about an anarchic secession all we want, with our First Amendment protections. 
           Vermont (The Republic of Vermont 1777-1791) has an active secessionist movement currently. In Canada, the very large province of Quebec has voted on separating from Canada but so far, they are remaining as part of the biggest country in the world.  Quebec and Vermont united in an Anarchic state. Everything needed would be with the borders.
                Lord knows the current situation in the United States is dire. The countries largest demographic, dumb white people, have opened the floodgates to all kinds of poorly educated kooks and deplorables and your well educated white nationalists brainwashing whom they can..  Can you believe it, the fucking Nazis!

              After beating back white male authoritarianism for 50 years, it has come alive again like an alien popping out of Americas chest or something, with the electoral victory of Stupid Bigly. 
                          
                2008 was one of Americas most difficult years as we were mired in the abyss of the two ill-conceived, unconstitutional wars and billion dollar businesses failing as the housing market crashed.   

 

 

             Don’t even mention reducing the military to anybody. Our foreign policy is about the 1,000-year-old Holy War between Islam and Christianity, and I am stunned people are oblivious to that fact.  A new Counter-Revolution needs to happen against this religious right wing anti-communist kookism that has ran world affairs since World War 2. 

 

      C}   THERE IS NO RELIGION IN THE MARKETPLACE

                     Regular folks created Rockabilly and its enthusiasm took over the world, along with surf music a few years later. We want to sing and dance and play rock and roll in the garage, nobody gives a shit about white supremacy and immigrants. Fuck your god and fuck your racism.  This unconstitutional intrusion of being under god and in god we trust, needs to be dealt with. Elvis, Charley Parker and Buddy Holly are our triple gods. Poor people gonna do it again.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgGE5GD4iRUkdlPR0Ai70EfNGFtKbfCzd
           We are going to have a revolution in music to get the white people back on track. Rock and Roll was created by the fusion of black boogie-woogie and white hillbilly music and created the greatest art form the world has ever known. Some say Gospel and Bluegrass are the main influences. That’s right Rockabilly fathered rock and roll and they boogied all night long.
                      "I knew if I had the chance that I could make those people dance and maybe they'd be happy for a while"  The mission is to go into the heart of rural culture and de-program these bewildered hillbillies and the flummoxed flatlanders that voted for Stupid Bigly.  I’m starting a Hillbilly band for the purpose of dancing but also commonality and consensus. Community Democracy inspired by the Black Panthers.

         White liberals overcompensating with their white guilt will tell you black people invented rock and roll. It’s even racist to suggest otherwise. Rock and roll was invented when all the sub-genres of music came together, but particularly, boogie woogie and hillbilly music (which was kinda Bluegrass.)

           Some people say Rocket 88 by Ike Turner is considered the very first rock and roll song in 1952. Some say rock around the clock in '54 was first, among others. However, I suggest the Delmore Brothers song "Hillbilly Boogie” in 1946.  This is when hillbilly and boogie-woogie were fused together and the song was about playing the boogie-woogie on the guitar, instead of the piano. Hybrid vigor. That would make rock and roll over 75 years old. 
           Bluegrass, Blues, Western Swing, Boogie Woogie and Hillbilly music were streams that fed the river that became known as Rock and Roll. "If you don't want my Peaches, Honey, don’t shake my tree".   
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgGE5GD4iRUkdlPR0Ai70EfNGFtKbfCzd 

 

                 
          All the streams for social justice and workers rights are currently flowing into one river. If it isn't directed it will flood everything with confusion as it does today.
                                           ↹
          One of the first labor strikes was in 1834 by children demanding an 11-hour limit to the workday. Okay? Since then, workers fought and died to work a 40-hour week and a weekend to look forward to, because nobody should be slaves. Companies don't own us they employ us.

          Newt Gingrich however, would have poor children work in their schools as janitors while the rich kids go to Sea Camp. Dignity for the worker voter citizen has not been embedded in our culture but it will be soon because that is how a workers revolution will work.  
             
               The 2 billion working poor in the world are suffering so the Donald tr***s of the world can have gold toilets. We have had about enough of their shit and the long-awaited worldwide worker's revolution is about to begin. Thanks to Stupid Bigly the workers now know the rich would crush them if they could. The only problem is white workers who have been voting against themselves during this Reagan Era of Greed. 
          White male supremacy operatives have wormed their way into our political, law enforcing, and educational systems with right-wing brainwashing. This is why an outreach is needed and why I am starting a Hillbilly band. Why we all need to reach into their fox ‘hole den and pull them out into the sunlight.

 

               Other white people have maliciously maligned hillbillies and many of these mountain people are actually industrious and fun-loving redneck survivalists.  They were Americana, you know, Rt 66 and everything uniquely American such as blues and rockabilly died as the Interstate Highways favored large corporations. Black farmers were foreclosed on then at black dudes were thwarted in their efforts to use the GI bill.
            So today, because of all the fights for equality in the last 50 years, we are theoretically all on an equal footing. Unfortunately, cops are still racist, and the whole system is still toxic. It's sad to realize this, but the worst problem is white intolerance of Mexicans, witches, handicapped people, and just about every demographic going. I always thought they were the snowflakes since nearly everything makes them uncomfortable. What the hell is wrong with these people? Bricks in the wall of their refutable racism.

 

 

 

I hope you remember this  

            One strategy by White Nationalists since 1960 was to make sure felons became unable to vote, and there are now 3 million black felons finding it difficult to get work and unable to vote. This is one of the reasons why Driving while Black can be a fatal enterprise. Even walking while black. Then the honkies say welfare is what broke up black families. 
             Many of us have been shocked that so much racism still exists. My old relatives are dead, my Unitarian brothers and sisters embrace all, even crazy me. My children are post-everything and I have learned a lot from them. My 20 customers are all jovial, nature loving people and we never discuss politics. So I am surrounded by kind loving people and I honestly don't hear bigotry anymore because I am about sick of nasty white people and won't go where they are. 
           I saw in my grandmother a person who was bigoted against blacks then finally realized, "every group of people has its good and bad."  She even had a lawn jockey once upon a time. It seems that nearly everyone saw the absurdity of being racist in my lifetime and we were living liberty and justice for all from here on out. I don’t hear any racism anymore, honestly. I did hear the “he’s the wrong color” meaning white discrimination at Wal Mart the other day. I let those kind odd comments hang in the air like the rotten fruit they are.
               The white enclaves known as the Fox News echo chamber continues to delude the trump humping bumpkins, the cock holsters of gangrenous greed and authoritarian excess.

If he could have been honest

                Thomas Jefferson is one of my 23 gods.  Thank God, Biblical Law is not constitutional, or we would not have any freedoms at all. This is what the warriors for Christ do not seem to understand. Biblical Law and Sharia Law are kissing cousins and they would be the death of me, for heresy and blasphemy.  Christian "Patriots" will be thanking God for atheists when Sharia Law finds they hit a stone wall anywhere they try to establish Sharia Law in the United States. Because the atheists were there fighting for the Constitution. Real patriots fighting for us right here in this country. Thank you for your service.
                 Thanks to the Founding Revolutionaries, we are given a shield to protect us from coercive religious authority, because otherwise, heretics would be in prison and gay witches would be dragged to the center of town and burned for entertainment. That really hurts you know, to be burned alive. Or scraped to death with clamshells like Pagan scholar Hypatia was by a christian mob.
             The influence of Paganism is everywhere, and yet this word stirs up the ancient hatred, a brainwashing and induced delirium that has been going on for many hundreds of years, by the most fraudulent, illegitimate authority in history.  I keep wondering when the right wing kooks are going to discover the millions of Pagans and Pagan tolerant and Pagan curious people there are in our country.  You know booga booga, demons and all that shit.
             The founding revolutionaries subverted religions insidious grip on power. Christians would still be burning the Witches, I am sure, and this inspired the Bill of Rights so religion could be marginalized once and for all. On the internet, I find the witch demographic as the friendliest by far, and the most gracious and wise group of people that I have ever encountered.  
              Trumpoons will add Pagans to their Gay, Islamic, and Mexican list of people to harass and we will then realize we haven’t advanced much since the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 or the Zoot Suit riots of 1943.
            There was friendliness and trade between the natives and the roughneck pioneers at first.  The founding revolutionaries were familiar with native freedoms. Following close behind from their pulpits of hate, the ‘elitist clergy’ actively promoted the slaughter of the Red Man to all would listen. Religion hadn't reached many of the Hillbillies in the hills. 

        The slick talking, rubber jawed, city slicker preachers had a convenient target for focusing the rage of the Pioneer peasants in the New World. The Native Americans were seen as far too pagan to be managed and assimilated and being extremely earth-centered, they could never really be Christians so the idea was to kill them all and let god sort them out. 
         Washington Jefferson Adams Madison and their ilque were the actual greatest generation. The complacency and blind obedience of the misnamed greatest generation gave the world 20,000 nuclear weapons. It gave us a surveillance nation contrary to the bill of rights. Normandy survivors worked in weapons plants that have filled the world with weapons and gave them a great retirement. It's ironic they gave everything they could to fight fascism during WW2 but allow it today with the neo-con republickin' coup of our government leading the way.
         Subservience and fealty to corporate greed have destroyed unions but greatly benefited stockholders. Meanwhile, our young people (parent of 5 here) can far better articulate why racism is wrong and why sexism is incomprehensible. Millenials will not allow "war without end" that Boomers have allowed. They mistrust the pedophiles (catholics) and the demagogues (baptists) that claim to be christians. They have far more expansive vocabularies than high school graduates of 1940 that memorized Shakespeare but accepted "colored bathrooms". 

 

            There is no comparison in my mind between these nasty retirees I meet who have replaced "feelings" with fear and submission to authority.  Men are taught to crush their feelings and rumble inside with restrained emotion. When I was 20, I remember being oddly proud that I hadn't cried since I was ten years old. 
            There has never been a generation that has allowed so much bad policy to prevail or accumulated so much wealth. Myopic vision of short-sighted opportunists has left us with radioactive waste, plastic filled oceans and mercury-tainted fish, leading us to the brink of environmental collapse.               

        Sorry bro, but I've taken it upon myself to defend Millennials when I see them maligned at the expense of the close minded dupes, lackeys and sell outs of the older generations.
        “A psychotic pall so widespread, it was assumed to be normal” John Trudell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLaxhRmq1wQ

                                                                  DOG WHISTLES      
    Hillbilly is a word for white people.  Metal is another word for white people.  Didn’t know that, did you?  Boogie Woogie still stirs my soul, and Hillbilly and Metal music know how to build up momentum.  I like what I like when I like it and it does not mean I am a racist if I like white music or make a white playlist.   I'm still trying to figure out what the hell is white culture anyways. 
           Then sure, Barack Obama. The problem there,  is that his white half was sensationalized as communist, and then ignored.  During my adult life, white people are often on the ropes about how they are not racists and white men are constantly accused of being sexist along with being racist.   
             Liberal city slicker whites fall over themselves overcompensating on the equality issue, gushing over non-white everything. What is white culture anyways? I mean really. European? Japanese people are pretty white aren't they, but crazy white people put them in camps during WW2 and the media convinced regular folks that the Japanese couldn't be trusted. The fight for freedom, remember?
             Not many people have been as critical of the whites as I have and WASPy greed masters have been my primary target for many years. Their Capitalism is Americas worst nightmare and I've always called it Predatory Capitalism.  
                  I want to delve into white issues because I see some perspectives that can get us to a higher level, but it is nearly impossible to talk about white people issues without somebody blowing a gasket. I've heard mostly negative things about white people for decades and it does get tiring. I wish people could accept each other.  Tolerance is not enough. One world one people.  Unity without hierarchy. Workers, citizens, and voters “I don’t want to spend my life being a color.” Michael Jackson.

 

 

 

             Now, in the 21st century, our modern sensibilities are not able to comprehend how women were not allowed to vote until 1920. People are finally able to embrace women equally as men, as we should embrace the Goddess as well as the God. Whatever.  
                 Lately, however, I have been visiting these alt right websites and they are as angry as ever and they have a desire to marginalize women and they praise the  homebodies. I mean, haven't these people been in the working world? I deal with female property managers and Administrators and teachers and writers. It's a different world now. Women even are welcome on boats these days. 

              Those aren't demons, we call them germs now.
              In 1789, just before the bill of rights had been formally ratified, southern racists were having a tantrum and would not sign on as part of the 'United States' unless they could keep their slaves. Northerners thought this unfair since they had to pay their employees. Labor was dear in that, as yet un-pillaged North America. 
                  During the Civil War, the 1% of the southern population that owned slaves, convinced the poor whites to fight for them. I can't help but think of this lackey attitude when I see some 'rebel's' flag fluttering behind them as they drive by. Brainwashed bigoted chumps. No offense. I roll my eyes when a "Smoke truck" sends black smoke (rolling coal) into the air.
             In 1789, northern economies were primarily community-based and agrarian. You could buy, sell, repair and trade nearly everything that you needed to run the family farms right in your home town.  Household Industry involved 80% of the population. Before factories, people made products at home and the Industrial North had yet to arrive. The steam engine hadn't even been invented yet or the cotton gin, so to a Northerner, slavery was an unsavory and unfortunate reality that needed to change.
             Unitarian ministers were prominent in the safe house underground railway movement and the last person arrested for heresy in 1848 was a Unitarian. Always there fighting for social justice. Onwards to 1960 when only 10% of the black population in Mississippi was registered to vote, prompting the need for civil rights legislation in a country founded on freedom. Constant, incoming tides of coercion from white male supremacists who continue to do harm. A persistent stain in the fabric of democracy.
              In 2008, a liberal hating lunatic burst into a Unitarian Universalist church with a gun killing two and injuring seven. The shooter, Adkisson, stated that he had targeted the church because of its "liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country." 

                      Racists are traitors to Liberty. 
      Freedom and Compassion got married and their first child was named Liberty. 
              In 1895, children were working in factories and Protestant CEO's took great delight in hiring the Catholic wave of immigrants from 1875 to 1895, and recreated European feudalism in the cities of America. Back to the right kind of white, only the ruling class considered themselves privileged and they hated Catholics.  
              Two kinds of white people? Privileged whites and working whites. The ruling class and the working class. That's why the only war in the future should be class war.  I have Facebook friends who are quite antagonistic to whites and I want to say, hey don’t raise your babies to be racist. They learn that shit, it’s not in the genes.  

          Greedy oppressors and yeah,  we know all that. I saw in my youth how white people participated in the marginalization of handicapped people, and keeping blacks out and making the Browns pick fruit with no opportunities to further themselves or become citizens. The Yellow Peril is another embarrassing chapter of white privilege in a previous era. With Enlightenment at hand, we have become post-race and post-gender and participation in prejudice is a thing of the past. I had thought. Workers voters citizens and children, remember?
              As a teen, there was a disturbing amount of bigotry abounding, mostly in school ans church, with my Uncle Joe being the most prominent with his antagonism of Black people.  
             Time waits for no man and it got to be the 70's and   most went on a success track, I rejected the white-collar world and the sphere of college edumacated idiots.
             I was content to work a second shift janitorial job because the steady paycheck gave me enough money to do what I really wanted to do. Ride my bicycle, join book clubs and visit book stores. I went through some nice guitars and took jazz guitar lessons.
               At work, my friend Dewitt would say 'you got?' or 'I got' and we'd take a nice long break when the work was nearly done. One great time was when we said forget the work and we all watched the entire Young / Ali fight with much discussion when it was done. Young won, but judges felt Ali needed to be beaten decisively to have the crown taken from him. Everybody loves Ali but he lost we decided.
                In the 80's bigotry was viewed as favorably as a canker sore or really bad breath, and in the (non-white collar) working world, the need to survive was a common struggle with all colors and all genders and we all helped each other best we could and listened to each others stories.  The working world, not the white shirted parasite class.
            Go to bourgeois(white) locales and the Ivegotmine upper middle-class whites will be uncomfortable with a black dude walking around with a "kill all the cops" T-shirt. Because white people suck his facebook friends yell in caps. So are we doomed to this atrocity and reprisal hamster wheel? 
             Try to conceptualize that the ruling whites are also standoffish with me and my hillbilly truck, my nasty face hair, and my Union cap confounds the confederate, flag waving racists that remain. The North won bitches, we are the UNITED States and no you can't have slaves and if you need to be beaten again it will happen.  
          What I'm trying to say is don't be my Uncle Joe and perpetuate mistrust of other people. whatever your race is. My diatribe about Brown people was to illustrate the ridiculousness of color issues. I get into some interesting conversations wearing my Union cap. The South will rise again they say, and I say 'and do what exactly?' #unitywithouthierarchy

         Was it my ancestral whites fishing and farming on the Azore Islands during the American Civil War that were the slave masters? You check on this, but the sources of prejudice from white people come primarily from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. WASPS. As the much discriminated Irish and Italians found out, you must participate in the system, you will no longer be targeted. They created the mafia to supply the liquor White wasp people needed to perpetuate their atrocities.  
                              DONUT  SHOP PUNDITS 
            They needed a smooth talking anti worker, anti- environmentalist who makes white people feel good, to run for president. Someone the 'white guy with a clipboard' demographic can embrace. Someone the cranky old white people in the Donut Shop can quote.  

           Conversely, the black and brown donald trumps have raised their children to hate 'the man' and 'whitey' when a large percentage of white people are like, what the hell? Race can't be an issue anymore, anywhere, and racism needs to be addressed and the white nationalists are talking out their ass of hate. The good white people are emerging after 35 years of sleepwalking through this military, corporate, and right wing religious coup of America. The aberrant tumor that made corruption legal.
              Time for all of us to unite as workers/voters/and citizens. Out of many, ONE. "Is anybody in there? Nod if you can hear me" 
                Stupid Bigly is walking into a fascist police state 35 years in the making, so I find the dumptrump movement a waste of energy.  El-Rushbo has paved the way with Alex Jones and others right behind him. Roger Ailes has been our Joseph Goebbels but the difference is this.  25 years of brainwashing is already in place by Ailes alone.  Ailes was his program director and, Limpbaugh endlessly repeated phrases such as 'the rich are the job creators', ad nauseum. A lie that became gospel to his truth-impaired fans,  believable because of the relentlessness of the repetition. 
             Then at Fox News, Roger Ailes’ motto was to brainwash the nation with a white male supremacy agenda without them knowing it.  Three guidelines for brainwashing are repetition, repetition, repetition. 'The lies became truth and Fox News Director Ailes created an army of Herman Goering’s wannabes, sitting in their living room with their gun in their lap, waiting for the liberal bloodbath they are prepared to participate in. How many times has Rush-bo or his callers said "lock and load?" Hundreds of times in the 6 years I listened.
              With an enemy of public education, Devos in the cabinet, Blackwater has now gotten in the inner circle of the White House.  Why would this be, other than anticipating the rise of an elitist Himmler style attack force?  
  A Right Wing International Cadre of Lawless Marauders
            A mercenary army that is already embedded in police departments and the military and is KKK inclined the 3% Warriors for Christ, at the least. Fence keepers and Soldiers of Odin and 984 other hate groups.
              This is what I mean when I say most people have no idea the danger that white nationalists pose. Importantly it’s a white Male supremacy agenda and not a master race thing that includes women. "You are going to bear a child for Hitler and the master race." Instead of a regional conflict, we are looking at a worldwide explosion of war as Putin and Trump divide up the world as slow moving, long term planning China is completely taken by surprise and marginalized.  
            They will do it to "contain China". Therefore, you wake up one day and you can’t get online with your laptop or phone. You turn on the TV and chief executive Stupid Bigly is on every channel explaining the crisis. "China did a very very dumb thing by bombing our refineries with neutron bombs.”  In actuality, Oil and gas companies had sabotaged loosely capped wells and weak pipelines creating environmental havoc then blamed it all on China. 
           We need to be prepared for the unexpected advancement of the right wing coup that has been in place the last 35 years. Personally, I think the golden age of humor, actually #theorangeageofhumor has arrived, as I call it on Facebook.  Lately I have been more pessimistic and I need a song to give me hope.

             Grassroots solidarity will finally blossom with the inspiration of Independent Bernie Sanders and it will be either The Final Slaughter or the worldwide workers union depending on how the battles go.  Stand up or stand down?         

    The nation is certain to be in an uproar if things go really badly. It’s a big ship to turn around but I see a Nixon-Agnew type of exit for our chief executive and the vice chief executive.

                        WHO ARE THE WHITE PEOPLE?
          I research so you don’t have to IS my motto. The search starts with who are the white people?  At first,  I follered the Caucasian People to the Caucasus Mountains they are supposedly derived from. It’s out near Armenia or something. Well, they migrated to Romania and then eventually over the entirety of Europe. 
              Then I found out another branch of the Caucasian People went to India for a couple thousand years and then they came back and took a more Northerly Route than the first Caucasians. I believe these people are the ones referred to as Aryans. This was as the last ice age ebbed and unconventional wisdom has Europe settled much earlier than Conventional Wisdom states. By 14,000 BC the ice age was ebbing and nothing but grass filled meadows were in every valley. 
                 Now I read people from India are closer to Caucasoid than any other genera.  Lithuania to India saw many white people migrating back and forth and there is a secret there I am trying to uncover in the ancient past. One peculiarity is the the Lithuanian language has similarities with Sanskrit is the most prominent archaeological clue.
              There are 25,000-year-old stone houses scattered across Europe and vivid, artistically rendered cave paintings. H.G. Wells discussing the cave painters or Reindeer Men as he called them.
              “They had vivid perceptions, an acute sense of animal form; they had the real artist’s impulse to render. These races of Reindeer Men were in undisturbed possession of Western Europe for a period of at least ten times as long as their interval between ourselves and the beginning of the Christian Era, AND THROUGH ALL THAT IMMENSE TIME THEY WERE FREE TO DEVELOP AND VARY THEIR LIFE TO IT’S UTMOST POSSIBILITIES.”  
          But we are taught that the first "civilized" people were the brown people from the desert filled with crazy religions, remember? Mesopotamia and the cradle of civilization was drilled into our heads in school but the indigenous White People of Europe were the Reindeer People, and possibly descendants of the Grimaldi People of West Africa. 
           Maybe the original Denisovans, or the Neanderthal, but people seem confused when I tell them that it was the brown people and their Holy Rampage of Conquest that disrupted and destroyed the indigenous white people along with the indigenous black people of Africa, and everyone's triple gods and goddesses. Christians are interlopers in Europe and Islamics have been coercing Africans for a thousand years.

            Imagine it’s thousands of years ago and you are a teen with a sense of adventure living in Georgia, south of Russia. Maybe 5000 years ago. You and your posse go off in the spring intending to come back by winter.  You visit the ancient ruins of Atlantis at the north end of the Black Sea. As you approach northern Italy’s mountains you head back after being blocked by the Alps. Then you come across a remnant tribe of Grimaldi People.  The Grimaldi people had migrated from Africa and arrived in Europe 50,000 YA via the Straights of Gibraltar. Yes, black people were among the first Europeans.  
           The ancient cave painters and reindeer hunters had moved east and north, assimilated Neanderthal man, and then met the migrating Caucasians 10,000 years later as they migrated a little further north in Europe. 
              You spend a night as the guest of the Grimaldi Village and note the children riding the amazing posteriors of the First Homo Sapiens sapiens of Europe.  Then you and the boys stay and forget the way home. So now, ask yourself where did these two sets of people come from? It appears that the first religions and the first cave paintings  occurred in Africa around 60 thousand years ago and a northerly migration out of Africa was also occurring as the Ice Age ebbed away. 
                    In addition, there was an eastern African migration that the Proto- Nubian People had around 100,000 years ago. It is as if there was an evolution of spirit somehow around 120,000 years ago, as Homo sapiens became our final form, Homo sapiens sapiens. H. sapiens sapiens around the world had evolved and ancient prototypes became extinct over the next 100,000  years. Except for Yetis and Bigfoot and the Allegheny Cabbage monster.
             This is where my freedom of religion comes in. I take different threads of very ancient history and try to weave a sensible carpet that suits our purpose. In my religion (from a very ancient secret source), the Goddess Venus arrives on earth on a clamshell, I would guess around 120,000 years ago.  The water levels of the Red Sea were at their lowest point when she arrived as a previous Ice Age was in place.     
                   The humans found it natural to co-operate and share the bounty of fruits and vegetables. Then they traded salt and gemstones, eventually discovering gold and silver. Figs, Jerky, and Palm nuts too. People were not inclined to kill each other like in the movies, but to have a nice day and a quiet night.  
                     So where did white people come from? How about the so-called Yellow People?  Supposedly derived from Denisovans (a separate human species) from Siberia.  Then you realize that for all the folderol about race and wars, we all come from a similar place not really all that long ago geologically speaking. 
                 Evolution is real and not a theory. Where did the Chihuahua come from you ask? That’s right, in less than 20,000 years the wolf became the Chihuahua because of evolution. Humans are also malleable that way. 
               Look at pandas; they all rather look the same. Squirrels, Camels,  and Elephants are indistinct from each other. Squids haven't changed much in 600 million years.
             Whereas, cats have genetic variety, and bovines evolved into many different looking ones. I'm saying some creatures never change or evolve while  others are prone to evolutionary adjustments. 
             Then look at the people in line at 7-11. The pasty white rich people, the drunken painters, the black roofers, Mexican landscapers, nurses and secretaries of every color are in line and I am part of the working class   struggle of the industrious working poor.    

             One question I had was, are there two distinct two white races? They are elite whites and worker whites, but are they the same color? If you look  at who owned the factories where children worked or who owned the plantations or who dumped toxins into watersheds or who stand to make billions off the Keystone Pipeline or who owns the City of London, it has always been the WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. They are the masterminds of world domination.

 

          They give all Europeans a bad reputation with their cold, bleached egomania. My people from the Azores fished and farmed for centuries before coming to America as did many other Europeans running from the religious kooks.  They were simple forest folk that became Hillbillies when they came to America.                                                                     The black/white schism had me wondering what would be a way to unify all people.
             In Africa, going back to a tribe 60,000 years ago, and to the Reindeer People who were the indigenous Europeans 15 to 40 thousand years ago, these Pagans lived with their triple gods and goddesses and people of Europe and Africa had very similar lifestyles for thousands of years.  Tens of thousands of years. As I explained, the Grimaldi People were the first black people to inhabit Europe and those descendants of Pygmies assimilated with the people they met as they drifted eastward and it's why Mediterranean whites are shorter than northern whites. 
                What happened was that the so-called civilized people of the Middle Eastern area created capitalism with their overproduction of wheat and began invading the lands of the indigenous Europeans and indigenous Africans. These brown people invaded the villages of black and white tribes as they moved northwards, westwards, and southwards. Thousands of years later, Islam and Christianity (those crazy desert people) usurped peaceful pagans with violent, forced conversion and leaving millions of slaughtered pagans in their wake. Black and white alike. Unity without hierarchy----heed the call. We will be too powerful if we work together.
                 Compare the 13 goals for a witch, to let's say, the 10 commandments where the whiny god of Canaan exhibits his jealousy of other gods, and is quite prepared to torture you with fire for eternity if you get on his bad side. Then there is islam where a husband is allowed to beat or kill his female property. Can you see why both of these bloodthirsty religions have demonized Paganism and Witchcraft over these many years? We are the competition and an injury to one is an injury to all.
            They needed a scapegoat. There are no demons in the craft as far as I can tell and I’ve been studying and practicing Paganism for years.  Racism is the new kid on the block compared to Pagan Hatred.                                             

         The Holy Rampage of Conquest by Islam and Christianity over the Indigenous African people and the Indigenous European tribes is a slaughter your ancestors want you to address. 
                 The Brown invaders became the white usurpers as Pagan cultures were conquered demonized and assimilated as they moved North and West. When these ruling whites got to America, the Native Americans were considered Pagans---plain and simple, and these, upper class ruling whites, were delighted as Baptist Preachers promoted their  genocide. By 1920 the spirit of the Native Americans was broken and they disappeared into movies.
             A book from 1928 called Lady Chatterley’s Lover, describes post-WW1 England. The ruling class has power because they are the most qualified to lead, they told themselves, and don't forget that he who has the gold makes the rules and that is the actual golden rule. 
          In the book I mentioned, the coal miners in the town drag their feet home every day after 12 hours of slavery in unearthly, horrible conditions. The local oligarch, the owner of the mine, looks on their parade of gloom with pity, and repeats that he has “been given the burden of keeping the rabble in line.” 
          Maybe he could give them a free ham for chritsmas and the pitiful masses would be thankful, not realizing the actual criminal class that the Oligarchy is, and the theft of their labor and their lives must never be forgotten and I hope your hear their call.
           Oligarchs are mobsters and criminals when they keep people in chronic poverty. Keeping entire towns impoverished, what kind of asshole does this? Look at these extreme capitalists; they have many WASPS among their ranks. These are the white people that the people of color should be upset with. These are the ones with the control problems. These are the ones to tax to rebuild an entirely new infrastructure.

 

                

      The people of the single god theory and their political machinations began burning and banning the meek a long time ago. Hell, they even "burned their own daughters if they playeth the whore" as it says in their book, the Old Testament.  Christians crawled into the exoskeleton of the dying Roman world and became the "Holy" Roman Empire.  
           They banned the Meek in 395 AD and began a thousand year campaign to eradicate the meek and their thousands of gods and goddesses.  A long bloody struggle, it was, till they finally conquered the Lithuanians who were the last remaining Pagans in Europe.  This was in 1384 when the 15-year-old prince of Lithuania married the 12-year-old christian princess of Poland. Sacred fires were kept burning till the last one was extinguished in 1434, it's ashes thrown in the river, just in case.
              They named buildings, rivers, and towns after their saints and they stuck the heads of dead Meek people on poles to convince other Meek people to give up their kind and fun loving cultures. 
             Meanwhile, a little south of the holy empire, the last prophet and the people of the scimitar began THEIR holy rampage of conquest. They considered themselves great warriors but they married little girls and beheaded many of the Meek and we say "yeah right dude, real manly". The ancient stories of the Meek were burned at the library of Alexandria so all traces of them would disappear. This was something Rabbi's, Caliphs, and Bishops could agree on.
           The cross and scimitar invaded the indigenous cultures of the Meek of Africa and the Meek of Europe and took their gold as forced conversion became the order of the day. Their great holy leaders surveyed the world years later, and found that the Meek had finally been subdued, the blood and money cults of Abraham were victorious, and the Meek were subsumed. 
           Today the Meek have begun to make their voices heard. "There is no god" and "there are many gods and goddesses" the Pagans and Atheists declare. These are the new people of the word. The many words of the internet to double check all these con men. 
          Their great goddess holds the lamp of liberty aloft to light the way and the great journey of the Meek has begun, guided by the words of the first true covenant of the people called the mutrfukon United States Constitution, bitches. Every day gets a little brighter as the dawn of civilization approaches and the Meek (today they are known as Pagans and Atheists and Independent thinkers) are cautiously coming out of hiding to reclaim the cultures of the world. This is the basis of black and white unity. Fuck those Brown People.
                The white WASP elite needs to feel the sting of the workers discontent from the inevitable worker's revolution.  Like in the south during the Civil War, how did less than 2% of the population convince the other 98% that secession and war was necessary?  600,000 deaths for bullshit. Cold-hearted elite, the slave owners, sent the working white people to their gruesome deaths. 
                 Nasty white WASPS opened factories fashioned after slave ships and Catholics such as the Irish and Italian were scorned and abused. In todays America every European country has assimilated itself into the industrial greed machine and the white collar parasite economy perched atop the actual economy. 
                 Maligned no longer, the Meek and their peace loving allies are poised to rule the earth. Ecosystem Stewardship is the word to replace resource gobbling for gold. When the dumb white demographic catches on, we will have another Progressive Revolution.

 

At this point I could have ended the article but didn't. It just goes on and on more like a book than an article. Feel free to quote the article and utilize the concepts. Don't let the doomsday clock run out. 

 

 

and a new attitude regarding wealth. When they realize all wages would go up if we put the 1% in jail. Just for fun. A little profiling, charge them with a felony and tear up their corporate charter.

 

                       
          Unitarian Universalists have no exclusionary ethos like the way hyper-patriarchal Christianity and Islam does. Unitarian Universalists are the kindest people you will ever want to meet. We had a lifelong Muslim visit our UU church one Subnday Service and he came to talk with us. Everybody in the congregation is fine with Islamic people worshipping down the street because UU's want to get to know you, not your religious beliefs. UU's embrace all.
            Bring something to the table, some conversation, some volunteer work, that is what the UU’s are about and what freedom of religion is all about. UU's are the American Freedom of Religion ideal.
              Well, we were not impressed with our Muslim visitor as our liberal Reverend asked questions and we listened as the Muslim preacher articulated his Stone Age opinion of women’s equality. The enlightened, liberal Muslim opinion about gay people is that it is up to Allah to judge you. “We cannot judge you. “ Then Allah burns gay people in Hell of course. 

 

            Catholics and Protestants have been willing to fight for decades in bloody wars in the past, but civil authority has constrained their violent excess in the last century. A Secular framework in the United States has penned in biblical law finally, and has kept it from being implemented.  They are like Wack-A Mole, taking over state legislatures and drunk on needing power. We have to do the same with Islam. Ban them both, get it?  The 9th amendment is about precedent. Use it.

---

          In God we trust? Added in 1956 by Congress to replace "out of many, one" as our national motto. What in the Hell for? In God we trust, all others pay cash? Trust God to do what exactly? I know Magic and the Law of Attraction has affected my life, I can claim, but with God, maybe not so much. What really chafes my goiter is how swearing oaths on the bible has been normalized. For crying out loud, use the Constitution. Rule #1 is not to endorse ANY religion. So help me god is such a load of crap too.
                    I have no patience for christian nonsense and their coercive proselytizing and I can see Islam using Christian.  Legal Precedence to shoehorn Sharia Law into our legal system some day.  We don't need it. We don’t need any religious law, period! So dig this.                                 

       The best way to keep sharia law from getting embedded, is to continue slapping down attempts by christians to embed THEIR stone age biblical law into our secular legal system.

 

         The founding documents created by ALL the founding revolutionaries were designed specifically to exclude God from the governments 'covenant with the people’.  To assure life and liberty, and to ensure the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to not have to deal with zealotry in the town commons. 
          If your religion thinks the American ideals concerning liberty and freedom are a bad idea, then maybe consider a different country to go to if you are a refugee.   
               Liberty will always be in ascendance over religion in this country thanks to the founding revolutionaries who built a time-tested framework of morality, without any god interfering.   Most of us are accepting of all who cross our path out here in the working world and in the streets of America and in the kind community churches.  Seriously, though, keep your religion in your pants and don’t wave it around in public. Most of us know how to get along. 

 

           The intractable dilemma then is not just religion, but how to deal with the gun issue. Wait, what? Let's drive straight into that wall called the second amendment, no one survives. It's all or nothing gun rights advocates claim. Once you outlaw semi-automatics, it's a foot in the door for taking all guns. As the Obama pointed out, there was not one attempt by executive order to take any guns, and more guns have been sold during his 8 years than in any previous 8-year period. We have the proverbial guns coming out of our ass.
            Keeping religion away from the Commons makes simple constitutional sense. We have to go back to what the founding revolutionaries believed when they made a constitution for the ages.  They asked themselves, how do we deal with crazy white people and their guns and god? 
           In years to come, many billions of Passenger Pigeons were shot out of the sky and the breed became extinct in 1913. Buffalo's were slaughtered by the millions until only 1,000 were left. We had freedom, but too many guns, too much hate, it seems. Racists seemed to love killing things. It's no surprise people that hate and cheat are the meanest demographic.

War Always War. Tuba cannons from WW1

            Rebels they were back in 1776.  The Founding Revolutionaries were Rebels with a winning record. They were mostly farmers and small business owners jacked up on Liberty and Freedom and they were disturbed by the increasing British coercion in their communities.  Most of them didn't even go to church, even though preachers warned them germs were demons and there was an angry god waiting to baste them with his special angry marinade and burn them in Hell-Fire. Toilet Paper was still a gleam in the eye of civilization, though Bibles were often used as toilet paper back in the pioneer days. 
                          

 

         Farmers with 'old fowling pieces’ were able to rout out the soldiers of the largest empire the world had ever known.  The Minutemen some were called. The Sons of Liberty. The Loyal Nine originally. These were not people coming home from church.
        Raw Revolution it was, and I try to remind people that all those portraits of Revolutionary Heroes were done towards the end of their life when they were old and famous.  Ben Franklin was very old at the time of the Revolutionary War and was the elder statesman, but most were in their thirties when stirrings of the revolution began in 1765. 
          They had guns. They had them out in the open; you knew who had a gun and who didn't since you had to carry gunpowder and other items, not to mention the size of the gun was obvious.  Guns were a welcome sight, you never knew if a rabid animal needed to be dispatched, or some horse thieves needed force to meet force.  "Go back and tell your boys they ain't welcome here no more." 

 

               Your citizen militias were groups of people who set out to protect each other with their guns or whatever; neighbors looked out for each other in many different ways.  People who had each other’s back. 
                 What does a well-regulated militia mean anyhow? Groups of people protecting their community? Their neighborhood?  Their state?
                  When the British Empire brought in governors to replace locally elected officials no one went home and got their gun so they could shoot up the place. Lunatics didn't have guns in most cases.
            The founding revolutionaries used boycotts and hooliganism to make their frustrations known, and saved their guns for war. When British soldiers began going into people’s homes demanding to be housed and fed (and looking for guns), the American Colonists began plotting their overthrow.  
             As Liberty grew in the minds in the Colonies, the misguided Great Britain thought their average, every day, enlightened despotism would subdue the rabble. Not this time. No timid third worlders here. This was America, many united as one.
             Gun sales were way up in the pre-revolutionary days of 1775-6. Theoretically, no one could individually stand up to a band of soldiers demanding lodging, but the presence of a well-regulated militia made the Redcoats think twice before coming into a town. 
              When news came that Henry Knox and his teamsters from Boston had hauled 80 cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston Harbor, the people of Olde Boston Towne were inspired. Be a fair fight if I get the boot in first they said going to the house for their gun.
              Ships couldn’t get out of that harbor quick enough with the surprise cannon attack, and ships in retreat were ordered to abandon Boston and go north to Salem to make a new capital. The despicable rabble with their old fowling pieces and stolen cannons had made the Crown blink. 
              So given all this revolutionary mischief, what is the core of the second amendment? It was to allow people to gather civilly and provide protection for their community.  You knew who had a gun, and very importantly, you knew where to go for help. 

 

               
             Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton could have been an engineer and a lawyer respectfully if they had put their nose to the grindstone and finished their pursuit of degrees. They became revolutionaries instead. The Panthers were caricatured as gun crazy rioters, but Huey Newton knew every gun law and could find precedent for every defiant gesture he made, at the law book library. I  have yet to see a purer use of the second amendment considering what the Black Panthers did. Their motivation was the protection of the community and "Seize the Time" by Bobby Seale captures that moment in history.
            They were truly a civilian militia and their club was a gathering place. They knew what kind of weapons could be carried into which situations.  They created a sense of community and it is not about individuals with guns, it was about policing the police. They were like those upset with the British in 1765-75 who gathered under Elm Trees to organize actions. This is what Freedom of Assembly is about. 
            I think the missing aspect of our argument regarding guns or no guns or licensed guns is this: Gun Clubs and Rifle Clubs.  The crux of the argument against the government knowing who all the gun owners are, is that the government can confiscate weapons in a civil emergency.  This can't happen with gun and rifle clubs.   
              I am of the school of living with no guns anywhere. I much prefer the America I thought was visibly gun free.  I grew up in a transitional farm community/suburb and no one had guns. The farmers didn't seem to have guns. 

          There were many children on our street and we never saw guns, from parents or otherwise. People weren't packing on their way to the A&P; it was part of what was envisioned as a peaceful time. You could send your kids to go to the movies downtown with the trolley and feel safe about it. Whoever you were in whatever neighborhood you were in. 
               In the boomer era, we were about dirt bombs, bicycles, sleds, and swimsuits. It never occurred to us that we could go to school and be shot up and massacred. Blown up in a nuclear war perhaps, but the outside world, in general, was not to be feared. What an unimaginable horror it is to explain mass shootings to little children these days. How can we bring sanity back to this country?
             The idea that crazed, badly medicated loonies can go into all our peaceful places and shoot everyone up is no longer acceptable. What next … Wet and Wild? The top floor of the Empire State Building? Terrorists find it impossible to use planes and now have turned to mass transit.  
                How  do we protect ourselves in public places? We create a network of well-regulated militias.  Gun Clubs. I even think the second amendment includes having an armory. A community armory. To keep government goons from raiding gun clubs and armories, an exclusion zone can be created. Club members only. Don't forget that ninth amendment. Gun Clubs can't be involved with neighborhood watch or you will end up with 10,000 mini dictatorships in this country. 
          Certain weapons can and should be banned, because how is the right to keep and bear arms legitimate otherwise? Why can't we have wisdom with this?   If we can create speed limits then we can make a few kinds of guns illegal. If we can ban hand grenades for fishing, we can keeps guns out of the hands of loonies.
             Today we allow weapons that gun lovers, home protectors, and hunters do not really need and most of us don't want to live in a Wild West movie. What we have now is a nation full of people all giving each other the skank eye because trust has gone out the window with all these weapons and white anger.
              Guns were legitimate 200 years ago, as people  needed to protect their property and themselves on occasion. They had to protect their crops from destructive animals and to keep from being raided by cattle rustlers and worse.  
            The unacknowledged part of the second amendment is that we want to be able to rout out oppressive government and criminals.  Many go pashaw, the government is far too powerful and you couldn't acquire enough guns to fight the government. They can just bring in tanks. Are there enough assholes out there willing to shoot their fellow Americans for a crooked government?
           Keep in mind that it once took 80 cannons and old fowling pieces to rout our foes, 242 years ago.  Britannia ruled the world, but the 13 colonies thought the freedom was worth fighting for.
          Thomas Jefferson's secret was that we needed to protect ourselves from the assholes that usually end up in government. They were abundant in his time as well. Thomas Jefferson had a vision of someone like Stupid Bigly declaring martial law and they jerry rigged a covenant and a constitution that has lasted an unusually long time. This is why I poo poo rewriting the constitution. 
             This is why Jefferson wanted us to have an antidote to encroaching fascism in any form and the founding revolutionaries wanted to be rid of ALL coercive authority. They were Libertarian Anarchists, like it or not. They set up a government that they thought would lead to freedom for all. It wasn't supposed to be instant but a guide to eventual full equality. "Authority is derived from the free consent of the people." stated a pre-revolutionary era document called the Fundamental Orders.
           So let's run with the redneck wingnut scenario of 2016. A false flag national crisis occurs and Barack Obama sends five black helicopters to your house.  “Martial Law has been declared” the internet screams and your computer goes dead and President Obama has made himself Dictator for Life. This is what they imagine. Not the right to start a union or save a forest. They are chasing their tail and barking up the wrong tree at the same time.
           You run outside to panic and 20 soldiers jump out of the black helicopters and run towards you. This is what is imagined by my  neighbors and other cock holsters in this Trump town I live in.  This is why they have AR-15's. Some crazy ass paranoia, I'm telling you.

         I'll send you some #postcardsfromtrumptown.
            At what point should the white nationalists do as a national  crisis unfolds (Obama declares himself dictator for life) ?   Play it cool. Maybe they aren’t after you, and were going to raid the organic okra farm next door. Always play it cool. There's a plan to take t***p down with a tranquilizer gun if he doesn't want to leave, here in 2020.  I would hope. He had a treasonous insurrection instead.

 

             A well-regulated militia is one that makes sure all of its members pass proper training and do not own any banned guns.   A community… remember… with people helping each other.  

                  I think the gun issue is going to confront the Big Pharma issue. You and I know people who “don’t like their new medication” and many have trouble adjusting their medications and most believe our nation is totally over prescribed in the first place. Apparently, America takes 60% of the world's prescription drugs and there are those who suggest it’s excessively medicated people who perpetuate the mass killings.

 

                  Back to the question I would ask Middle Eastern Muslims who want to come to this country. Do you think Mohammed intended you all to take over the world?  It is a yes or no question. Yes would be treason. This should be an easy question to answer; what do we do with Muslims who unashamedly treat women as less than equal?  
              So  for crying out loud, quit pandering to christians forcing their biblical law wherever they can. Biblical Law has to be blocked first and foremost so as not to create legal precedence. This way, our grandchildren can ban Islam from embedding itself in the future. That's how America works because the Founding Revolutionaries looked decades and centuries into the future and secular law is there for everyone, you knuckleheads.

 

        I hope I was able to expand some perspectives with this, but to conclude, the boogie man of Sharia Law that the right wing is obsessively scared of, is best prevented by keeping Biblical Law out of our country. Ironic, isn’t it?  Some of us want religion out of our country altogether and we will be the ones to keep Biblical and Sharia Law from making any inroads into our embedded laws. 


     Instead of posting refutations (transitive verb. 1: to prove wrong by argument or evidence: show to be false or erroneous.) on each page, this is a blanket condemnation (the expression of very strong disapproval) for all my wonderful but bamboozled t***p supporter friends. Read your history books, the racists insist, the Civil War was about tariffs. Well no, it wasn't.
         

         In 1789, Ben Franklin said, in one of his last political efforts tried to insisted they should outlaw slavery. Elite wealthy Southerners bristled (getting ones dander up) at the thought of having to have to pay for labor and they pouted and fumed and nearly kept the country from forming. Got that? White Nationalism has ALWAYS been divisive and un-American and it's promulgated by a vocal minority. Authoritarian Oligarch wannabes.
         Segregationists and gooberism, (v. to hate blacks and marginalize women) prevailed in southern states. Then it took 100 years to combat Jim Crow laws that unconstitutionally took rights from the freed slaves, but on the other hand, sign makers profited greatly from all the "colored only" signs that were printed. (this is caustic irony---not literal).
            To see the enthusiastic support for the nastiest carpet bagger  (n. a person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction) of all time,  DJ t***p(Stupid Bigly), how can we not see y'all as a bunch of   sycophant chumps,  easily brainwashed by the clergy and that angry prick at the donut shop. We're here to help. 

 

               Hey, I loved my flatbed truck and cowboy hat and hillbilly yard full of shit "I might need someday" and my dank playlist of southern inspired music,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0fu9OHqZ1Y&index=19&list=PLgGE5GD4iRUkdlPR0Ai70EfNGFtKbfCzd  Seriously though, how can you support these seriously demented assholes who want to disassemble the parts of government that the people need? 
          Independents and Progressives will be reaching out to y'all to discuss some plum bodacious northern notions. It's really cool because, we respect all. We see a persons head and heart, not the flesh prison.  We want to take us off the hamster wheel of capitalism. Leftists will be fighting for you against this congealing oligarchy and the more you abide by the lies you have been told, the longer it will take for the long sought equality in America the Founding Revolutionaries had envisioned.

           We don't interrupt women with fly, white guy mansplaining. and we throw a smile and offer a handshake to everyone we meet. Or we will when the Rona is gone. 

          Lastly, it allows organizations such as unions (n. they represent the workers against corporate greed and there are scattered populations of them in the north and west) to exist to help the individual. We are the people--we are the land—.

             “A policy of containment” it was, but you didn’t enhance my pursuit of happiness with Vietnam. In fact, my last six years of school was tainted by the looming presence of the military draft.  Did my graduating class need go to Asia to kill people we had no real quarrel with, in order to stop a world takeover of communism? Sounds kind of loony in retrospect doesn't it?
               We didn't get it, it seemed to be a severely dysfunctional world filled with prejudice and inequality that we had been born into.  Greatest Generation, my ass! Once I left the numbing and stultifying school system, I began to read. I joined book clubs and went to many used bookstores. I talked to Libertarian Anarchists and drove 30 miles on my bicycle to put in my volunteer hours at the food co-op. Sometimes you'd find my bike locked up in front of the state library researching trees and corn, of all things, while others were getting abortions for their girlfriends. 

           I am sure I learned more my first four years out of school, than I would have learned going to a college town socializing with Bourgie Rats, and I made up for the dearth of real knowledge in high school by reading whatever I wanted and talking to whomever I wanted. 

 
          History is not much more than the tainted perspectives of the Pagan Slayers. Had the Deep State emerged by this time? Were the Masons a secret cult? In plain view but also hidden? I developed this notion that a cult of "warrior elite" had been secretly running the world for 2500 years. 
         The theories of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas rang true to me. There had been Goddess oriented societies in all the indigenous lands of the world. Gimbutas notes that, prior to 500 BC, European pottery, aside from Greece and Rome, did not depict warfare.  These Goddess oriented societies had streets and small homes and common areas for storage and protection. 2022 is not the pinnacle of civilization, I'm telling you.  To read the story of who the indigenous Europeans were, go to "The Stone People", also on this blog. Got a search bar check it out.     

       Had a bloodthirsty strain of men taken over the world's cultures? A cult of patriarchal supremacists? The new religions burned and buried all traces of the ancient, peaceful societies of the past, but the earth warriors will be back to kick it up a notch. Not saving Earth for her, but for us.

2-11    THE INDEPENDENT MAJORITY     

THE INDEPENDENT MAJORITY PARTY    

                          “If you are stuck in an ideological rut, (Liberal or Conservative), the incendiary rhetoric contained herein may greatly increase blood pressure. Please be advised that in the emerging marketplace of ideas, the independent viewpoint needs to be heard.” Excerpts from the zine, “Conservative Conservationist” (1995) and 2021 updates.

This chapter goes to the core of workers dignity and personal Liberty, and seeks economic and environmental justice.

        A   Malicious Guile on Display

        B   Environmental Justice

       C    Economic Justice

       D   The High Thread count in the Fabric of Freedom 

To find peace in this chaos is to be enlightened. The clotted nothingness of liberalism and the venomous spewing of most conservatives, represent only small slices of the American Pie; unfortunately, the only two that have a voice in the mainstream media. What about the independent viewpoint?   Independents have no steadfast, limiting ideology and we develop our own unique viewpoints and philosophies. We are tired of coercive governments and corrupt, polluting corporations and reclaiming the Commons is going to be one of our strategies.   We anticipate the logjam of the Liberal-Conservative debate to break soon and new ideas, independent ideas, will burst onto the media.

 Many people are beginning to recognize the emptiness of the consumer culture and are striving to put communication back in our communities, although it seems that a vast majority seems more concerned with appearances and acquisitions. In the past, many Independents have voted reluctantly or not at all. Over many years I have heard “there’s no one to vote for. I don’t like either if them.” The truth is that we don’t need term limits; we need easier ballot access for third party candidates and Independents.  There is not much choice between attorney at Law Tweedle Dee or embittered lawyer Tweedle Dum.

The Democranks and Republicants have our opinions properly stifled.  The next wave of activism will be a Progressive initiative to reform capitalism into a system that the world can work with forever.  At first, I thought of Democratic Capitalism. Concerned with the general welfare of the populace,  Democratic Socialists such as Bernie Sanders are looking to take our current revenue and arrange that money to go where it is needed.  However, for the long term,  I settled on Market Socialism.  A refinement of Democratic Socialism. Market Socialism immediately goes to the core of America: where we get supplies. Who cares about our war machine really and what the War Hawks want?  I don’t remember voting for perpetual war. Slash that budget in half and let the whiny white people leave the salty stains of their tears on the Statue of Liberty.

Every day we have to have supplies on hand but the corporate stranglehold leaves us dependent on them. Pandemics and Hurricanes showed us that.  The threats of terrorism and communism seem unimportant in retrospect. A New Square Deal is what we will call getting back the money the 1% has stolen from the working people in the last fifty years.

Progressives have been around a long time and here is the theme of the current Progressive Party, “We of The American Progressive Party seek government accountability, an end to wars of aggression, a vibrant economy, including living wage jobs, sustainable environments, social justice and constitutional rights for all.”   I would like to add from my own box of sayings, “encode liberty, embed equality, ostracize criminality and vanquish cruelty.”  This can be achieved in any country in the world.  If we have a global economy, we will certainly need global unions. We all can fight for each other and most know the apropos phrase is “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

               The Independent Majority is about the many millions of unique, free-thinking people around the world; a majority of people that crosses all class, gender and race barriers. Independents are not brainwashed into religious or cultural extremes, and comprise the bulk of what we call ‘regular folks’.

                In a collapsing society or in a Depression, or when the dollar is no longer the go-to world currency; how many pension funds, guaranteed by the government, can be paid?    How much money deposited in banks can be insured? Tea Party enthusiasts don’t realize they are one government guaranteed pension fund away from dumpster diving, and the government is backing far more than it could possibly support in a large market crash.  This is why Wall Street was bailed out in 2008.  The government didn't have the trillions to pay depositors and investors. 

                 A new culture and economic system have begun to rise up and its healthy greenery will grow a canopy over the dying, destructive, death dealing, war loving culture of Manifest Destiny.  This final, demented phase of Capitalism that wasn’t imagined, even by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Oligarchy, with their rose-colored greed glasses.  In their world, the rich should own everything, for our own good of course. 

                                                                                  

 MALICIOUS GUILE ON DISPLAY

                  The star of the Progressive Era was Teddy Roosevelt, a Progressive Conservative, who was often at odds with big business.  A true conservative historically has been mistrustful of the Bigs.  Big banks, big companies, and big religions.

                Theodore Roosevelt was one of the few in power who were brave enough to confront Big Business and the predatory monopolies head on.  He saw what grappling beasts the giant corporations could be, and how the Mom and Pop, Market Capitalism, and our traditional rural culture  were suffering from corporate bullying in the market place. He was also enough of a conservationist to have started the National Parks system AND the National Estuary Program.         

   Je suis Teddy. Sadly, even if government taxes and interference were reduced, as the conservatives want, greedy corporations would quickly jump in and increase their chewing and sucking of our lifeblood, as parasites are inclined to do. This is why we have to reduce the influence of corporations AND government equally. Most regulation has only stifled the very small business entrepreneurs, not vulture capitalists investors like Stupid Bigly. The goal of reformers will be to knock aside the corporate apologists  and entrenched bureaucracy. while the real battle ahead for authentic conservatives and practical Liberals, will be in defense of small business.  

Barry Goldwater was an advocate of small business and a smaller government, and his advice over 60 years ago regarding budget cuts was to, “put the ax in the right places.” However, these days (1995) there have been a lot of misguided chopping. Mean spirited Republicans eagerly axing small programs that funded community improvements in 1995. Programs that often organized (liberal) volunteers to help assist paid employees were dramatically slashed for no reason other than spite. It doesn't matter how clever the program, if there is one whiff of Liberalism; these empty hearted Republicans go after it. A 2022 update: they are worse than ever.

                The Master Gardener program, within the Agriculture Department, harnesses 10 times more volunteer labor than the total paid labor hours of the program. I know because I went through the program three times in two states.  It is one of the best government-subsidized programs going and for how much, the cost of a dozen patriot missiles.  That’s ten volunteers or Interns or apprentices for every paid employee.  You won’t find any conservative based programs that can do the same. What other organization does that? Hmmm? Meals on Wheels, that’s who! For god’s sake, how can you stop feeding the hungry and send an army of volunteers packing as the administration of the Orange Menace got into gear? It’s the most shortsighted budget cuts ever, nothing but malicious guile on display.

                The Master Gardeners are helpful educating the public.  I know because I volunteered 175 hours with them, and every year there were budget cuts in the Agriculture Department, slashing ten or twenty thousand dollars on this good program every year or two so everyone involved sacrifices a little to work and volunteer for the Extension Service.  Meanwhile the Congress in the last 15 years can’t write a check fast enough to buy bombs or increase their own pay and benefits. 

               Service in America has gone to shit with the tight-fisted corporations who spend lavishly on themselves but pay peanuts to the employees. Servers working too many tables, part timers covering too many departments in a store, and many other degradations of the once, service-oriented America. Sales oriented Sears may or may not survive as one example.  They didn’t at our local mall.

                Another example of shortsighted Republican budget cuts in 1995 was the 2.5 million dollars cut in the department that releases formerly classified documents. You know, like the documents that exposed the names of soldiers who were used as nuclear guinea pigs in the 50’s during atomic weapon testing or the files of black men that were given diseases to see what happened.  We’ve read the news and compartmentalized the torture and people say, “Aw that’s a shame, thankfully it’s in the past”. Well it’s not. The right wing reprehensibles would light witches and gays on fire in the center of town if they could.

 

                                        ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

                Seventy five years ago, there were three times as many hiking trail miles as there were logging road miles. Currently the opposite is true and there are now three times as many linear miles of logging roads, compared to hiking trails. It’s cheaper to develop hiking trails, isn’t it?  Keep the trees, where they are, we can recycle for our paper needs. We can grow Hemp and Kenaf and others to make many wood and paper products.  We are quite ready to leave the trees where they are and let forests become wild again. We are eager to give hemp crops a chance to revitalize small farms.

You see, those scurvy Republicans are poised to launch more forays into our ancient forests. Moreover, in 2022, republicans are ready to sell naming rights of our National Parks to corporations, if not outright sell the parks to mining companies and other polluters.   It’s not about global warming in my mind, it’s about the pollution of our air and water and the nearly complete destruction of the world’s ecosystems. It’s about planning for 1,000 generations from now despite Capitalisms goal to liquidate it all. They will need the earth too. Please, sell some military bases around the world to balance the budget. Computerize the Pentagon and have bake sales to buy that next jet.

                 I found some old forestry magazines from the thirties and took a look. Many articles warned about the foolishness of clear cutting. The last of the old time, original conservationists of the Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Era had passed on by the 1930's. Logging companies were slogged for being greedy instead of being steward of our wild lands. The Forest Service lost sight of their mission and became a toady to large corporate interests by the end of the Second World War.   Forests became primarily for the corporations: bribes and politics and all that. Money doesn’t grow on trees, it is trees. 

              Millions of acres were clear-cut for the population explosion and cheap paper products fueled a big chunk of the prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s oblivious to that were, in many cases, hundreds of years old. Destroyed also were the micro niches in ancient forest ecosystems that are now lost.

                With logging lobbyists rewriting forestry laws, the last ten percent of the Americas ancient forests are in peril, in the name of cheap paper and wood products that have been priced far below what they should have been since the end of WW2. Why did the greatest generation figure the rapacious plundering of the forests would last forever? I thought they were good at math? Clear cutting until they were clear cutting second growth, and forest devastation was finally curtailed during the seventies.

Didn't their parents dunk their heads in ice water to punish them if they got bad grades?  Allowing nuclear waste and encouraging the use of poisonous chemicals while they hacked away at America’s natural resources and pocketing the profits for themselves was wrong it’s too late to dunk their heads in a galvanized basin filled with ice water.  The people, who have been asleep since WW2 ended, are too old now for that, and they need young people to lead as the love generation boomers were nearly as bad. The Love Generation found out what they actually loved was money, luxury, and retirement security and they were nearly as bad as the greatest generation when it came to the foresight needed for the future. They invested in the war machine pretending it was “the space program.”

                Why have conservationists been assaulted in the media during this never-ending Reagan Era of Greed? The concerns of conservationists over the last 50 years have been to save what is worth saving, while every hurdle possible is thrown out in front of them. Corporations throwing teams of avaricious attorneys at private civic groups fighting for their land and safety. The conservers of nature battle with conservatives who have sold as much of the natural world as they possibly could, not comprehending what they are doing to God’s treasures.

              What is wrong with saving a 500-year-old tree? What is so right about making toothpicks or cheap tissue paper out of it? Hang tough, it’s no crime to have a little foresight, and saving the Creators wilderness is important. I may or may not believe in a creator, I am pandering here to believers, but they need to realize we need trees, god or no god.  Trees are real; they make air, while religion hot air from the pulpits of hate.

                Can’t we make toothpicks from recycled material?  Of course, we can. Logging companies still clear cut because it is cheaper to cut down a 200-foot tree than it is to recycle old pallets and wooden construction waste and the forest service needs to be gutted and re]aced by the protectors of the forests. That’s a real shame and an indictment on capitalisms excess and waste.  If clear cutting were banned for 10 years, woodlot management and recycling would finally become viable.  No more than four trees an acre every ten years is my guide to define what clear cutting is. Inflation yes, but we need a good dose of inflation so prices can float up to where they should be for resources and essential labor.  You might not know this, but, with inflation, your home will have more value with an inflationary spiral and many fewer of us would be underwater with our mortgages.  The Country Club doesn’t want you to know that because they make money from usurious loans, and so by the end of a twenty year loan, inflation has eaten away some of their profit.

            How many Independents in the House and Senate? One? Two? It’s a joke and we know it.  (I was thinking of Bernie Sanders and his brave solo struggle when I wrote most of this in 1995.) Independents are not middle of the road, yet we are weary of two extremes. A constant hum of moralistic rantings and non-stop ravings by the moral high ground hypocrites and the immoral, depraved criminal class cheating their way through life. They are there lurking in the shadows of the honest workers.

              Independents are tired of the preachers and tired of the perverts and weary of do nothing politicians, so I’m asking, who speaks for us?  We are weary of the con men and the dishonest hucksters everywhere in America.

                We nearly woke up during the GATT “debate,” but they slipped it by us and now it’s another layer of bureaucracy to peel off. The public outcry did not convince Congress that GATT wasn’t what we wanted.  Are you kidding? A world trade bureaucracy? Telling me how much I sell my organic peaches for!

            I don’t think so; no to GATT and no to the New World Order. Say NO to a two-tier global structure of struggling peasants who have lost their land and rich elite parasites and polluters that are buying it up and destroying it along with the local ecosystem.

                                                                             ECONOMIC JUSTICE

                How much longer will the 20 cent an hour worker in third world countries remain silent, docile and obedient? They struggle every day with the knowledge that, in their heart, they know something is deeply wrong when they work so fucking hard under such horribly difficult conditions, while a select few are clipping fat cigars at the country club. 

                These workers need a match to set them off, and I’m eager for the day when that will happen. If the workers of the world unionized and protected themselves, they’d be off to a good start in this rat race. Our placid, over consumptive lifestyle will be badly shaken if 20 cent an hour workers were to start making two dollars an hour but it would create a good deal of income equality.  Not sure if you stockholders will agree. Your stock broker said space program but your investment went to incinerating wedding parties.

                Asian sweatshops that make our clothing a would have to pay workers a livable wage, then voila, Instead of being on the verge of starvation workers would have money in their pockets. American made clothing becomes more competitive in that case when slave labor gets paid a living wage.  I can’t emphasize it enough so I’ll say it again, the more workers make in all the other countries of the world, the more competitive American exports become. Furniture and many other products, whose manufacture has left our shores, would return if workers around the world were paid a living and thriving wage.

           Their product costs more but workers have more to spend.  It’s a win win, ya know and as Will Rogers said, “it all trickles back up to them anyways.” You are told of the down side of inflation by economists and Wall Street who only care about their investments that will lose their value with inflation and they repeat the lie in a thousand different ways that inflation is a terrible thing. 

 People have been brainwashed to accept a minimum wage that creeps up while insurances and many services  increase their costs at a far greater rate than the inflation rate would indicate. 80% of us struggle with the cost of this modern life that has been forced on us by the violent and wasteful paradigm of Capitalism. 

The war economy and nature destroying economy. Paltry pay affects too many families, but raising the pay of the lowest paid of the world would be good for all in that lifting up of all boats kind of way. Call it float up economics as opposed to trickle down. Some say the only way forward is to smash capitalism, but I am inclined to think that we create a new economy for workers instead and let capitalism collapse.

              (  #bernwallstreetbern )  All American products become more competitive when wages go up in the poorest parts of the world, and conversely,  these same people will be able to afford American products with better wages.  You know, like movies and music that doesn’t need super tankers to ship it. Float up Economics, let wages go up and create inflation. We can’t lose. Tax the funny money of the wealthy and turn their fake paper profits into housing and food for people. 

              Promote good pay and safe working conditions around the world and a new economy will emerge and a more competitive market for our exports.  Imagine better wages for all when CEO pay and shareholder benefits are reined in as a result of higher wages and safer working conditions and a 35-hour week which will give people more time to spend with their families. 

What I’m saying is that many people have become rich by providing goods for unnaturally low prices and call it prosperity. This makes it appear that Industrial Predatory Capitalism has really worked great with so much prosperity but an inevitable Predatory Capitalist system collapse will be discussed in terms of trillions of dollars. We are living under an Illusion of Prosperity, and the curtain of deceit is being pulled back exposing the swindles of them gold hoarding bastards.

10% on all accumulated wealth over 10 million dollars.  A luxury tax a la Monopoly until the national debt is paid, how about that as a budget balancer? It would pit bankers against the rest of the rich. The rich will pay off the six billion in interest on the national debt with this tax and a laser hot focus will be put on this ridiculous price gouging of the banksters.  The rich can also put the money back in social security that they used for two ridiculous wars and Ronnie Ray guns military buildup, which initially ballooned the deficit into the stratosphere.

                It’s a living hell for many in this world, and I want to know, where is the joy the Creator presumably wants us to have? On the other hand, is life supposed to be brutal with no universal consequences?  Maybe god is an asshole who hates people. You never know; that boss who screws us at work--is it any different than the cheetah biting and tearing the neck of the Impala? It’s just a slower death, a death of the spirit.  A concussion of the heart.

                Who best to lead the vanguard of economic justice?  Who has the simple concepts we can follow while reducing the ridiculous bureaucracy we have now? Brave enough to expose the parasite economy?  forward thinking enough to abandon the steam age economics of Narxists. The answer you’re looking for is modern 21^st century Progressives.

My favorite concept is called the Escalating Minimum Wage. I’d raise the minimum wage to 10 dollars an hour for small business, and 12 dollars an hour for businesses that have sales or income of a million dollars or more the next year. Then the following year, 16 dollars an hour minimum wage for billion-dollar corporations    An across the board 15 dollars an hour will not work and will be the final nail in the coffin for small business here in America.      

Republicans lying out their ass about this tax reform nonsense they passed that Democrats will have to repeal. Corporations such as McDonalds and Walmart depended on minimum wage workers to build their empires and fortunes and put all local small business, OUT OF BUSINESS.  Teen workers forced to go home if the worksite wasn’t busy. Workers with no transportation and workers having to arrange baby-sitting are frustrated to tears with this arrangement.

  Imagine all the workers that would have more disposable income with a more equitable worldwide minimum wage. Money to catch up on bills and go out, have some fun occasionally, and maintain sturdy, time saving appliances for their homes.  We are not looking for Jaguars with mink umbrella holders. People are weary of suffering. Our culture would diversify with even more variety and freedom of expression if more people had time to recreate and relax and having some jingle jangle in their pocket to do things would be a great relief to the people who have kept America running the last fifty years.   

                 Use minor league baseball as an example, and local bands and singers and musicians as another. Fans and audiences would better be able to pay for more entertainment with better pay.  Part time musicians and minor league ball players would all make more with a prosperous middle class, and consequently spend more.  People would be going out to listen to live music and watch minor league ballgames with a little more money to burn. This floating up of poor people’s incomes would benefit many, but the Wall Street “experts” will say inflation is a bad, dangerous thing.  Wall Street doesn’t want you to know that inflation due to increased wages would increase house values, but provide no benefits for banks whose profits would diminish as the value of their loan decreases.

  Restaurants and Historic sites would see an upswing in visitors when incomes increase and vacations expand.  People would vacation more with better pay, no shit. Corporate kingpins such as the Walton’s that own Walmart would find their 175 billion dollar nest egg start to shrink and it would be a good thing, as millions had more to spend.  People just want a vacation and a little vacation ,oney to spend but Sam Walton was a ruthless parasite. Soon a circle of prosperity would develop among the working poor, we don’t need luxuries, we need to pay the bills.  Extremely profitable business should pay the best.

 People growing and selling food as capitalisms waste and excess is sent to the showers. Food trucks are going to get a larger share of the restaurant market. Picture this: Non-GMO corn from Mexico made into tortillas filled with locally grown beans and tomatoes. For meat eaters there’s a certified humanely grown beef market to expand. Small Farm agriculture as it used to be known. Voila! A taco truck on every corner sounds like a good idea with people growing, buying and selling locally. A ravioli truck and a Hummus truck too.

                Many recognize what has been lost and it is not a social decay as much as the loss of the vibrant small businesses that had always been the backbone of the United States. The Klondike Capitalism of the early 1800’s and the Mom and Pop Capitalism up to World War 2 were vibrant, alive and diverse, and this is what has been destroyed by predatory capitalism.

                Big Business (Wall Street) has sucked the life out of Main Street and I think the whole Predatory Capitalist system is dysfunctional, anti-family and anti-liberty.    Do we revolt or reform? No, our answer to paracidicidal price gouging and usury is to take on second or third jobs. Too busy, too busy, and there is no time for spiritual renewal or healing. No time to slow down the destruction of the planet.

There are the lawyers, the bankers, and insurance industry profit pigs and health care price gougers. Not to mention bureaucrats and criminals: the parasites of the workers. All paracidicidal industries I’ve mentioned, do they make food or fuel? Do they actually produce something of value? Like vultures on our shoulders, their job is to wait for a dollar to fall out of our pocket so they can take it. Then Wall Street finds many different ways to funnel your money their way.  The final bamboozling is yet to come and upper middle class savings are the next target.

            Economies need to be based on workers protection and the easy movement of unions where they are needed, like, everywhere. Escalating Minimum Wage….hmmmm…...business experts would say that as wages rise, so would inflation. The Federal Reserve, a private corporation, wouldn’t like this either, but we need a good dose of inflation right now to take some pressure off some artificially low prices, and to raise some long stagnated wages.

                Governments and corporate elites have an economic system tailored to their greed and cruelty.  Seriously, would you personally have 500 workers making 20 cents an hour in your factory? Cold blooded CEO’s fire you if you cannot inspect and test a circuit board in less than 73 seconds---all day long, one after another. Human robots standing on an assembly line 16 hours a day so the workers children can have something to eat.  These companies need to feel the sting of the workers anger and frustration. Never mind having a family life in these conditions. Go home and sleep, go back to work.  The workers revolution is inevitable. The “owners of this country” are too blind to understand what they are doing to the spirit of people.

                In this country, lawyers have created a law debilitated justice system along with a grossly disproportionate representation in congress. Our constitutionally guaranteed rights cost over a hundred dollars an hour and predatory capitalists use the judicial system to bully anyone that bothers them.  They tie them up in court or bankrupt them with lawyer’s fees and there are literal armies of lawyers out there fighting against the public.

                                    THE  HIGH  THREAD  COUNT  IN  THE  FABRIC OF  SOCIAL  JUSTICE

                Where are the liberty seeking patriots? They aren’t the ones in those militias all fired up to fight a war with the government. They are not those big business sycophants who are holding up the crumbling façade of Manifest Destiny. The real patriots are the Independents and the Progressives and the Greens.  The activism and street protests are going to increase until the obvious inequalities in our societies is finally changed. Tired of the Republican Stupid, people are ready for action and I’m feeling energy. There is magic in the air and we need to pull it down. Anticipating an activist spring, an educational year to de-program those who have been indoctrinated.          

              The spirit of 1776 has been crushed.  We have replaced independence and small business with interdependence and convenience and what Noam Chomsky calls manufactured demand. We have replaced Liberty and Justice for all with the culture of the warrior elite.  Bloodthirsty foreign actions with drones and   jets dropping bombs on numerous wedding parties in Middle Eastern countries and trillion dollar wars encouraged by misguided people.   They are the War Culture. The tree cutting culture.  We are not a christian nation, we are an asshole nation.

Veterans have bought into all this flag worship and my country right or wrong nonsense, and feel they are patriots because they risked their lives in Europe and Asia and wherever else.  George Washington might not agree with the patriotism angle, and would find that bomb bomb bombing Iraq or Vietnam isn‘t the same kind of effort he made at Valley Forge.

Who will pay for all the fake wars of the future? Pension costs and toxic cleanup sites of military bases is going to bust the budget in the future. Can you see the headline in the year 2081? ARMY PENSIONER DIES AT 108. COLLECTED PENSION FOR RECORD 65 YEARS.  Yes, they can collect a full pension after twenty years of service. The military has become the prime example of socialist overkill. There is tremendous waste and virtually no citizen oversight and lots of money to spread around. Of course, injured and traumatized veterans earned their free health care and deserve what they get and more for rehabilitation, but this type of socialism will soon be costing us 100 billion a year in benefits for former soldiers.  This is why I think the military should cap its budget at 500 billion, and as the Post Office had to, the Military should also show how much is being set aside for pensions.

                    I know a dude that spent 18 years in the commissary selling shoes and he started collecting a full pension at the age of 45.   Needless to say, a Rush Limpaw addict and Obama hater and ironically a great complainer of moochers. What I mean to point out is that, to support the Conservative world totalitarian conquest, great incentives had to be given to people serving in the military so they would be gung-ho hoes disguised as heroes and unapologetic flag wavers.   You can bet that Mr. Sunshine, the shoe sales clerk, loves playing golf and going to the Tiki bar on your dime.

                 First thing they do to a soldier is unconstitutionally strip you down mentally and physically during boot camp.  Today we have a nation of hyper patriotic, roided up alo=hiccup=coholic retirees. Maybe we should shift the pension to start after 30 years served, instead of 20? Everyone is tightening his or her belts---except the military. Many today that are biding their time and milking it, so to speak, so they can get that 20 year pension.  You see them at the Tiki Bar, spending freely and drinking bigly. Later, they wobble towards their flag bedecked Cadillac. Let these leeches retire, then start phasing out all this gravy. Then there are the paper tigers in the Pentagon, the pencil pushing pensioners with plush payments.  So much can be cut from the military budget!  

The older generation had been brainwashed to worship all coercive authority. The boomers work ceaselessly to keep their heads above water or are deeply into the greed machine. The youth are looking ahead but don’t understand some of the old American traditions like blue-collar solidarity.

We don‘t want militias or Unabomber’s. Did Mahatma Gandhi belong to a political party? Billions of us have been transcending generation, race, gender, and class barriers to discuss the taboos of peace, love and rock and roll, and are aware of our right to speak out. Fight for your right to party, if you know what I mean.

                     Was America great when forests were clear-cut to ignite the housing boom of the 50's and there was the cheap electricity from government-subsidized nuclear power?  The rich were taxed 90% and the biggest middle class the world had ever known were born. Weapon manufacturing jobs gave people great pay, but now we have a trillion dollar cleanup at military bases and weapon manufacturing sites.             

              People got cheap electricity in the 50’s and 60’s but left the problem of storing nuclear waste to generations unborn.  There will be 10,000 years’ of storage problems in the future, another face palm moment because of the bass ackwards ‘greatest generation’.  The agenda of the Predatory Industrialists was to make a lot of money and creating nuclear weapons from the spent fuel. It was all about the bombs not the integrity of the workers lives.

                The profits of previous decades has given us the weapon-saturated world owe have today. When weapons are captured from Daesh (Isil), they are usually from America is the  opinion I have heard.  Along with toxic military sites, there will also be a multi-billion dollar effort to decommission these nuclear power plants that created temporary cheap electricity in the 50's 60's and 70's.  It will cost 40 billion dollars per plant to break it down and decontaminate it and then leave it to future taxpayers to bury monitor radioactive concrete for 1,000 years. This illusion of prosperity created by the misnamed ‘greatest generation’  of the 50’s and 60’s who didn’t give much thought to the consequences, or worry about the world they were poisoning as proxies to the Industrialists.

                Individuals may have free speech, but when many are united in the associations and organizations we belong to, it gives us citizens /voters/workers a weapon to use against coercive authority. The big boat is starting to change its course, so be prepared and look over the next rouge wave. Help is on the way. Be prepared to snap out of our national coma and be prepared to burn the ticks, fleas, leeches and parasites off our wallets and/or pocketbooks. Get independent, get in the majority.

 

Who has got the money, time AND temerity to be independent and face down the Democrat-Republican monopoly? Our constitution demands that we protect our liberty…how will we do it? This has to be the time Independent Progressives and Greens and Libertarians and others can create an umbrella third party. I suggest calling it the Independent Majority Party. IMP. #independentmajorityparty. The Independent majority Party would gain ballot access everywhere to allow Independents to emerge from the shadows.

                 Our life will be a cakewalk compared to what union organizers in the third world will face. The worldwide revolt of the 20 cent an hour worker is inevitable. Entirely new principals of thrifty and fair, war-free governments will be developed. The totalitarian capitalist despots and socialist coral colony  do-nothings will be on the run. Independents need to stand up and be counted.

                Imagine extraneous laws wiped off the books. A future where lawyers  make 1,600 dollars a week instead of 160 dollars an hour. We will all be able to afford fair representation in our justice system as our constitution demands? Maybe if enough laws are eliminated, people could get a law degree at like, a community college or something. Cool.

                A cleaning of the barn doesn’t say it any better. Ross Perot drove to the heart of our dissatisfaction with that statement. Paradise has been lost to the parasites. They exploit the hard-working people of the world and we act like faithful dogs, lemmings and sheep. We bleat furiously but realize we are already fenced in, “for our own good.” Push aside the liberals and conservatives. America waits for her sons and daughters to react. The Independent Majority has arrived. Focus…wake up….get involved.

2-12    MARKET SOCIALISM

SECOND Warning
  I am responsible for what I have written, not for what you 

think I wrote, or meant.  Simply stated, the opinions expressed herein, may at times resemble facts, therefore… always double and triple check before you let incorrect facts loose on the internet with millions of undisciplined minds on the loose.

         I believe it is a consensus that we seek, not confrontation, and I look for reforms that most can agree with.   

       The ultimate sad reality on earth is that there are billions of people living in misery on what was once a bountiful, clean planet.  It’s as simple as that.  Once it was ours and it will be ours forevermore if the working people wake up. Capitalism And Communism have failed and we need a new set of governing principles.

        Let me guide you around some of the seemingly intractable dilemmas of our modern era and offer solutions, and please be willing to contemplate new perspectives, because the 
voter/citizen/worker needs to lead now, and follow no longer. 

    COMPENDIUM

 

1/1/1  MARKET SOCIALISM 

   “ ....anarchy is the absence of coercion ....”

     The road to anarchy  will not be a chaotic anarchy as you’ve been led to believe, but anarchy as self-rule and managing ourselves in our various communities and keeping common local markets open for small business and household industry.  

Now that the rich have saved up trillions of dollars in hidden off shore accounts, we can use this stolen labor (profit)to create the Infrastructure Initiative  (II22) Envision something great for every one of us to use in the next 50 years in an expanded and expansive safety net, a beautiful and enduring hardscape and finally wildlife corridors for migrating wildlife.  We can create abundance AND create a new economic system.

One way to start  would be to sell half of our military bases,  the ones furthest away from American ports, and be there for our fellow citizens and any one we can. Friend or foe, we’re ready to help.  But closer to home, right?

The Republicans want to eliminate things we all own in common such as the National Parks, and so we need to put the languid and miasmic political will of the last 35 years aside, and let’s have a go at a New America.  It’s  time to roll ‘em up and get down to work to preserve our wild lands forever, and the last chance for you Democrats in 2020,  we'll have a third party otherwise.

We’ll be initiating the construction of a real infrastructure with immense areas set aside for barter and small business. Community spaces where the majority of us can set up our small business, or non-profit enterprise. Free spaces for all to use.  Not along the highway,  but in the rural areas that were abandoned when the interstates went in.  Giant parks for people to stay for free as they vacation and to accommodate those that are camping out in their cars.

This is not an outrageous notion once people realize we could have all this by simply taxing Walmart and Amazon, and  start penalizing the gangrenous greed of corporate America and its stockholder enablers. 
Put a cap of 500 billion on the military and have them explain how much their promised pensions and benefits will cost in the future like the GOP did with the Post Office.

In the much delayed, total infrastructure rebuilding program, there will be lots of work for engineers and designers, and good paying jobs for boots on the ground.  A real infrastructure for ALL OF US to have access to, AND a unifying coast to coast effort to show everyone in the world how it’s done.  Deconstruct this 700 BILLION dollar military that has brought peace to no one and power overwhelming for the Nazis running the United States.

There is plenty of money once people wake up to the illusion of prosperity that is capitalism. Why isn’t there emergency housing for natural disasters and tornado shelters in every vulnerable town? Where are the evacuation facilities for seniors and people with special needs during weather disasters? What about the many terrified people trying to survive an approaching hurricane?

We should create a country that cares for every one with a real infrastructure, with humungous rest areas on the highways for vacationers and people living out of their vehicles. Call it the INFRASTRUCTURE COMMONS, with lots of public land for recreation and small business commerce.                Taxing and demonitizing the corporate structure of Google Amazon Facebook and some others will allow the people to gain control of the people generated content. The Commons known as the Information Superhighway. 
       Clearly, large corporations were the only ones considered during the planning of our interstates, and we can fix that. Oil and Gas subsidies have to end so the alternatives can come online. Biodiesel is great for recycling restaurant oil and creating less toxic fumes and could compete with petroleum. 

I’m not going to complain without offering solutions of course. Taxing Gasoline at their source of production (the refineries) and taxing plastic at the site of their production will become a good income stream. Eventually, till we can complete the grid that will allow Americans to be free of government.  
              We can power and feed and rule without the monopolistic corporations and the coral colony of government.  George Washington said the government "should be like fire. A useful employee, but a terrible boss."

                      The people can use the government to create the structure that will make us less dependent on the government.  We don’t need more tolls and fees, what we need are pipeline taxes.  Duh, tax the rich, they wonder why we’re not!

I had been pushing the idea of a LUXURY TAX and I was happy to note a presidential candidate also suggesting this idea finally.  Unimaginable wealth has been accumulated, and like a rich harvest of fruit, we need to juice it and use it before it becomes a pile of rotting compost.

In contrast to most, I don’t think we should tax this years high income earners. These are the people who are doing the best in this current climate.  They’re doing something right. Tax total assets, once people accumulate more than 20 million dollars, the National Property tax begins. No one is earning that shit. 
        What do you think Mr. Libertarian, wouldn't it streamline government if we taxed ten people instead of a thousand?Everyone with more than 20 million dollars of equity, cash, stocks and precious metals would have to report to the government. Leave the poor people alone.
       Tax 1% of all assets the first year.  A One percent tax on total assets over 20 million dollars is a modest proposal. Side by side with eliminating corporate tax loopholes. We also tax businesses with more than 20 million in assets.  At the same time we can have our Progressive Senators and a re-animated Congress looking to eliminate corporate loopholes.  

This LUXURY TAX will go up one percentage point, per year, TILL THE NATIONAL DEBT IS PAID, AND OUR BUDGET IS BALANCED! Therefore, 2%  the second year. 3% the third and on and on.  Turning the pressure up slowly, it’s in everyone’s best interest to eliminate the national debt. Much of the national debt goes to banks and their usurious interest anyways, but then we can tax THEM and we keep the money flowing through the economy.
        No wealth will escape taxation. Instead of the poor reporting every asset and every detail of their life to qualify for indigent aid, and instead of every small business having to keep every receipt and burdened with regulations and a nightmarish tax system, we can leave the poor and middle class alone. 

Knock down all those toll booths and petty license fees, you’re holding up the working person.  28^th amendment. Tax accumulated wealth till the national debt is paid.  I shouldn’t have to use capslocks to make my point. 

The lawyer/lobbyists  have hijacked the United States and they like to find every kind of way to make your life more expensive and inconvenient.  They will do whatever possible to keep you from accumulating any assets, while they amass their dragon hoards. There has been unimaginable damage to OUR countryside by thousands of pipelines that destroy nature, but enhance stock portfolios.  

      This will be just a start in our national recognition of who we really are. Americans are not heartless opportunists. Not the working people I've met!

Is it about energy and national security, or is it actually about profits and market control with  a government run by corporations?  Our global effort to keep the earth from getting poisoned, will be about curtailing the abuse that automobile, airplane and truck exhaust has done to the life that was on this planet.  Yes, keep it in the ground for the thousands of generations unborn. Step one towards Market Socialism is to smash monopolistic control of the markets.

Artificially low prices from resource thieves have undercut all competitors and destroyed the fine network of small businesses that were in existence up until WW2. Money didn’t grow on trees they joked after the war and Money was trees.  American forests stripped for Suburban Cheap Housing Project. 
Far too many of them. Drastic degradations of all the mini ecosystems that are part of bigger systems such as watersheds and forests. For instance, buying a beautiful forest to clearcut it has to be considered theft, but today is still considered "good business"  I mean come on, this has been going on for hundreds of years nearly all the ancient trees are gone! 

Capitalism has created an illusion of prosperity. Houses filled with priceless junk and “what am I going to do with all this stuff?”

‘Just get a storage space, Joe’

People hunger for battle with the oligarchs and the first thing we need to do is take out all the tax loopholes that are in place for the Oil and Gas Industry.  Then get ready to ride the scariest ride on earth, “The Vicissitudes of The Market.” It’s not even about global warming I keep insisting, but the pollution of everything. Have international no fly days so we can see the old blue sky return.

  Replace the whole withholding tax nonsense and its attendant bureaucracy with a federal Property Tax for all billionaires and billion dollar corporations. Create a global effort in all 200+ countries, to expose ALL THE  hidden income everywhere, so the wealthy have nowhere to hide. Let the mighty be taxed mightily as it's suggested in the bible.

 Go ahead, tell me why that’s ridiculous or impractical Mr. Libertarian. Taxing ten people instead of 1000 would certainly streamline government, wouldn’t it? This is where your basic income starts. What can be afforded, and the blessings of Liberty going to the destitute and homeless first.

the previously discussed Anarchy cannot last with the predatory fascists looming nearby and would never be permanent. Therefore, Market Socialism is the best economic system that can exist for the majority of the people for the majority of the time, because complete anarchy would leave a vacuum for fascism to fill. Market Socialism is a designation most people can be comfortable with as it alludes to the elimination of record-keeping for the small business markets. A market where the sole proprietor is Queen, because corporations are not people. Only individuals can be people.

 The new rules? Thwart the monopolies by taxing the rich till the national debt is paid.  That sounds like a good idea. Imagine 50 AOC’s (citizen legislators) walking in singing a verse of Joe Hill as they sign the tax the rich legislation.  They’d think it was a movement.

 A squad to be reckoned with in Congress should be arriving in 2020 that should be implementing a higher minimum wage for larger companies.  Give the family run, Mabels Diners of the world a chance again, and make these billion dollar corporations like Olive Garden feel the sting of   small business dignity and community connectedness.  Commonality and communitarianism. 
The service industry treats its hardest workers the worst. many workers barely attain minimum wage after tips are shared. People in the food service industry know what I’m talking about. It should be a crime.

         Looking to get weighed, the people step on the scales of justice.  There was exceptional service in America once upon a time, but the new modern corporation thinks it’s a person. In reality, it’s a puppet show with pompous old men cutting every corner possible with tech billionaires poised to run the world.  Heartless capitalists with unresolved childhood issues.

        Sam Walton created the work atmosphere where employees talking to each other is considered a waste of time, and after three warnings for unauthorized talking, the pink slip. You know, we need to bond with the people we work with, people need to talk. Arms and elbows always in motion for low wages and heartless management strictures. For most of the people I’ve worked with, Capitalism sucks. There’s no reforming capitalism. Chain stores and restaurants, have left millions of workers despairing to what has happened to service in America.   

             

        The Workers Revlution means to fight for a living wage for all of the worlds workers, and in the end, this world wide workers movement will inspire all future generations to persistently  maintain an equitable worksite, so the toxic tide of corporatism can’t creep back into our world again.

        This time we win. Profit is theft from the workers who produced the product and every worker in the world needs to understand this. The age of Piratical Profiteering is over if we want it to be. We hunger for battle. The workers are ready.

Self government is where Socialists AND Capitalists both fear to tread.  How do you do it with the super structure of excessive government that is already in place, and a placated public happy with the status quo of corporatism and are not aware of the child, slave-labor derived products such as chocolate? A billion working poor people around the world, making products for the entitled Lord Fauntleroy’s of America.   

Bioregionalism is one of the tools to break free of all the previous inhumane paradigms. Another concern of mine is the red and black, the communists trying to usurp another movement it seems. 
        Why are we still dragging (Marx)around? We got remineralization of the soil to be concerned about and carbon and sulfur rates accelerating and we have to drag around someone who did not write a single word about the environment?

Russell Means, for one, has some thorough earth loving things to say, regarding our world, and he is much more relevant to the modern worker. Particularly in regards to marx he points out, which is just more white privilege in his mind, and I agree.  Just more of that old white bullshit.

Didn't Karl Marx's mommy make his lunch and bring him antibiotics for his carbuncles? He could barely walk to the bakery by himself he was so feeble minded. (something someone told me privately, not sure if it's historically accurate) But it’s well known his children loved him, which is good enough for some people. But seriously, how about labor theory from a more recent activist?
          In the early 1900’s, Eugene Debs was a great socialist and ran for President from jail and got quite a few votes and was instrumental in convincing people they were worthy of decent living conditions and a safe, fair paying job.

 Recall "fightin’” Bob LaFollette,  Progressive governor of Wisconsin, who actually implemented Progressive ideals into action and reform starting in 1900.  He reportedly had no carbuncles.

One person to accomplish advances for workers was Cesar Chavez. Strikes for better wages at that time made the general public aware of the problem of underpaid workers.  

                    Are there are no other theorists for the workers revolution? Maybe someone who goes outside once in a while and recognizes an impending climate disaster? It turns out people don’t care and workers seem too servile today to demand better pay. Maybe the spirit has been beaten out of us. 

Why couldn’t American furniture makers compete during the 70’s? You don’t compete with 25 cent an hour workers in Asia, that’s why. Therefore, an important part of Market Socialism would be to boycott companies that don’t pay, not just a living wage, but a thriving wage, in any part of the world.  This is where boycotts can slay the giant.

We can't raise the minimum wage high enough here, till workers around the world make more.  Simple fact, prove me wrong. Just an aside here, but did you ever notice the most frantic recyclers are the ones who seem to be addicted to buying things online?

 American, European and Asian companies have enslaved a billion people who now live in poverty, abject or otherwise, making nifty products and priceless junk for people with white collar jobs.

         Sadly, it was American corporations that threw American workers under the bus by moving factories overseas. My dad worked at the Royal typewriter factory for 20 years and was a victim in 1972 of unemployment when the company moved to England for the low paid, desperate workers.  In the 80’s, they  moved to Asia for the extremely low wages there.

          It has been a pity that The Left is stuck on the chalkboard Utopia of communism, and some even hinged to its rapacious Stalinist sideboard. It's the Green and Black baby.                   Americans are never going to call themselves communists ... and I don’t care how many quotes of marx or “books I should read” you throw at me.         

       The Blue Green and Pink will become Americas largest demographic after the ' voter citizen worker '. 
       Pink, Green and Blue collar united as one. Unity without hierarchy for the workers. Let the white collar parasites push the wheelbarrows for the Infrastructure Commons and let unionized blue collar fix and build up America again. The solutions to most problems lay in the garages of America, not the boardrooms in the cities.

Companies abandoned America in the 70's in order to take advantage of the reckless breeding in India and China  and Bangladesh that created far too many people with its misnamed “green revolution”. In their desperate struggle to feed their children, these people are willing to work for 15 cents an hour, 15 hours a day.  How do you compete with that? You should be banning plastic products made with pennies per hour labor, not purchasing them.  Place a tariff on all plastic products and boycott companies who are not fair to their workers.

At least try to source your purchases, because boycotts will be swinging from the cleanup spot in the big game. The mouths of these lawyer/lobbyist/leeches move when they run for office, but nothing changes, so it’s up to Progressives, Greens and Independents to stomp on the accelerator of reform.  The DNC donkey is dead and rigor mortis is settling into the entire body politic.

Like Islam, it should seem obvious that extreme forms of Marxism will never work in this country. We have to make everything uniquely our own and that’s what people have forgotten.   America IS different but no longer exceptional, with the right wing coup eating us alive like a tapeworm. They purposely bog down Progressives with fruitless battles, that should never have been fought in the first place.

Mass corporate hegemony of the Republican/Democrat, Wall Street Power Structure continues to feast on the pavement pelts of small business Main Street. Ironically, a minimum wage for all will be the final nail in the coffin of small businesses. It has to be a progressive or escalating minimum wage. Ten for small business (under a million dollars of sales and income), 13 for medium(over a million) and 16 dollars an hour for billion dollar corporations.

I signed a petition for $15 an hour minimum yesterday and found out it is going to go up a dollar a year and that’s something to work with to create a small business revival. I would suggest capping a small business minimum wage at ten dollars an hour with small business being one that generates less than a 100,000 dollars in sales or income. Leave small business alone. Let people make 10 thousand dollars before taxation and let small business make 25,000

             American Progressives, Greens and Independents are poised to lead the world out of its miasma of greed, but this never ending, left/right tennis match (back and forth back and forth), has kept Americans distracted the last 35 years. Marx or Mussolini?  What will it be? The Left has to abandon Marx to gain any credibility with the American worker, that’s all I’m saying. On the right, the GOP is what Mussolini had in mind.

The billionaires have shown their hand, they’ve chosen Benito’s  corporate-run government and they don’t care if we all die and everyone knows it now.  They are stripping the earth without any regard to the 100 billion people that will be born on this planet during the next 5000 years.

The workers revolution will be inevitable once the Steam Age academics of Marxism have been replaced and Republicans have been deloused and deprogrammed from the brainwashing of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
           How do you like that? We need unionism, not Marxism. Marx is insightful, but not useful. Does he really have to be the face of socialism? A man who didn't work or bathe? People are not inclined to malign Marx online and I don’t know why not, I know I will get heat for my stance.
         I do know an American will never call themselves a communist. Sorry Tom and others, I’ve worked with a lot of people in three corners of this country and Americans will never call themselves communists. Never.

Down here in the underpaid working world we have adjusted in many ways to the vagaries of the market. Capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich is the system we have.

Bankruptcy and foreclosure ?, aw too bad say the bankers who are gouging the American worker with interest. Should be a crime, used to be. Tens of trillions of dollars charged in interest by bankers to the detriment of American workers. 

For instance, in a world awash in excessive clothing manufactured by 25 cent an hour workers, we go to thrift stores now to buy much of our clothing in 2020/21. I buy three dollars shirts and pants on the regular and they are normally only nominally worn.  I got storm shoes and a nice pair of shorts for less than $5.  We go to Dollar Stores and church rummage sales and reliable second hand exchanges. We love bargains, but let the buyer beware with the guy that has the frozen shrimp in his trunk though, we all have our particular discernments.

The whole scene is changing from below.  There are more distribution sites from groups that are taking in food.   If you can turn over a ton of food with volunteer labor in thousands of sites, we can begin to lessen the reliance on government programs and eliminate as much waste as is practically possible. 

        The problem with the bush and t***p tax cuts for billionaires, was that the wealthy were theoretically supposed to step up with more charitable donations, and of course a handful have, but the dark heart of capitalism always says, “no thanks not today, the guest house needs new furniture.”

 

My point being is that we are drifting back towards buying locally sourced products again, Market Socialism, if we possibly can. We are buying hand made quilts for xmas presents. We buy reconditioned bicycles The over credentialed, over certified white collar world isn’t going to rule us with their stuffed and mounted academic validations forever. We can and are creating a Market Socialism structure.

  I would have each person exempt from taxation for the first 10,000 dollars of income, and $25,000 for small business.  In addition, we would lift the cap on social security from $106,000 to $ gazillion. Let everybody make a little money … for crying out loud, and give them food stamps if they need them and every person who has no permanent address but a social security number, a basic income. Make the Republicans fill the social security fund back up. Let the billionaires give back what they stole from the languid, complacent, servile, no longer unionized American. See how that works?

  Socialist Eugene Debs actually went shoulder to shoulder with the workers and spent nights in jail as needed.  Progressive ‘fightin’ Bob LaFollette, in his role as governor of Wisconsin in 1900, actually implemented Progressive Pro Worker ideals into action and reform.

           There are no other theorists for the workers revolution? How about someone who goes outside once in a while and recognizes an impending environmental disaster when they see it. People simply don’t talk about marx. I’ve worked in three corners of this country. To thousands of plumbers and gardeners and property managers and security guards and administrators and store managers and even homeless people I find sleeping in the bushes. Not a one of them talked about Marx. The working people don’t talk about Marxism, they talk about what is going on in their life.

The maids, the sandwich makers, the floor polishers, the CNA’s, your finishers your starters, the kitchen crew and clerical staff. Gardeners get around, we are usually the last to go onto a project  and people unload their problems. The ferry captains, the car washers turned computer techs, the vegetable growers and organic chicken egg producers. I can’t ever remember talking about marx, but we did talk a lot about unions. First I saw a union go in in 1975 and later we decried the disappearing unions in the 80’s.      

  America IS different and no longer exceptional with the right wing coup eating us alive like a tapeworm and we need more than Marx to stem the tide.   Small business has been destroyed and a minimum wage for all will be the final nail in the coffin of small business but we could have a cap for small business as I mentioned previously. Call it an apprentice wage.

         Progressives, Greens and Independents are poised to lead the world out of its miasma but the left/right tennis match (back and forth back and forth nothing gets done) Marx or Mussolini? The billionaires have shown their hand, and they don’t care if we all die and everyone knows it now.  They are stripping the earth without regard  to the economies of the future.

  Make a showcase for ending government intrusion of the market place with these market based community centers. Really, why can't I sell produce from my house? Land of the Free? It doesn't sound like it. We are strangling from an over-tweaked, law debilitated paralysis that destroys too many small businesses and keeps communities separated socially.  We are dependent on 8 companies to feed us, fuel us, fleece us and forget US. The four F’s.

 

2-13   TABOOS EXPOSED

 TABOOS EXPOSED

               In the 70’s when I entered the work force full time, unions were very controversial. In 1975 a union was voted in where I worked, much to the consternation of the chief influence peddler, I mean, department head. To everyones astonishment the bosses assistant ran for president of our local…and won!  The union reps were tearing their hair out. No, no, no, don’t vote in a member of management as president of your local! It took a few years to dismantle this lackey system, but the union raised a lot of standards and brought the pay scale more in line with neighboring towns and eviscerated the small town corruption. New equipment stopped disappearing and town workers stopped going to the boss’s house to clean windows and paint.  My dad was in the union and I got updates from him because I had moved out of state. I had moved to a “right to work” state, which is Republican Party code for NO Unions Allowed. In America, unions had always been there to show profit gobbling industrialists that workers rights would always be part of the equation.

  Unions were a polarizing force back then and I would hear people ask, “What does my union do for me anyways?” and in many cases they did nothing. Union money was going into political campaigns?  How can an organization speak for an individual voter, but on the other hand, there was always the old timer regaling us with stories of the old days, “Unions fought for the rights you have today you lazy ass kid!” Some remembered the bloody strikes of yore or heard tales from parent’s, aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, union wages far outstripped national averages during the 70’s, and unions priced American goods beyond what people in other countries could afford, yet historically, unions tempered the horrors of disgusting dehumanizing factories of the Industrial Age.                                                                        

   The question to ask is how best to represent workers on a planet wide basis because corporations just wander the globe looking for the least costly and most servile workers. A great fear amongst predatory capitalists is the day when all the workers hold the line together.  As it’s asked in a song by hair metal band Poison, “It just makes me wonder why the poor eat hand to mouth while the rich drink from the golden cup. Why do so many lose and so few win?”(           ) Unions are needed badly in many countries, and have not outlived their usefulness. Many unions had become bloated and complacent and corrupt in the United States and need to be modernized for the 21^st century. They need to be modified without the taint of socialism, representing workers during the rise of Enlightened and Sustainable Capitalism as we abandon Predatory Capitalism and the chalkboard Utopia of Socialism.

      So I agree, if a union has helped you reach equitable comparative pay and you can manage to negotiate within management then by all means, vote the union out. There are progressive companies such as Whole Foods Market that have many clever and generous ways for employees to get better pay through incentives, productivity and smooth operations without the intervention and bureaucracy of unions.   Ideally it should be easy to vote in unions and easy to vote them out. Many modern industries are fair to their workers but there are also many that are not and there IS corporate tyranny on the jobsite. An American should have the right to allow a union to step in and individuals should not fear corporate reprisals as workers at McDonalds and Wal mart know only too well in their attempts to unionize these low wage, no benefit, highly profitable corporations.                                                                    How about a worldwide minimum wage of one dollar an hour? There’d be so much chaos. “Cancel the order for the Rolls Royce and the quarter million dollars of furniture for the guest house, things are going to get tight with this global union nonsense taking hold.”  Something economists don’t see is that if that worker in the sneaker factory in Thailand or Bangladesh made a dollar an hour instead of 25 cents an hour the price of the sneaker would only go up from seventy dollars to seventy five dollars because as we now know, most of the cost goes to the corpulent export executives. The global sweatshop has proven to have inhumane conditions, so why not pay 7% more for those sneakers so workers can have a livable wage and a life worth living?  A dollar an hour minimum wage for the world, would finally make a better life for many millions, perhaps even a billion people and slightly higher prices for those of us that can afford it.

         If foreign goods began to go up in price because of higher labor costs then guess who benefits? We do! Get it? This is when inflation is a good thing; American goods still cost the same while those sneakers from Thailand will cost more and the more these Corporate Slaves in other countries get paid, the more competitive American products become. We can’t lose! It’s in our best interest to promote safety and good pay in all jobsites around the world no matter what the grumpy neocons may tell you. This is the secret corporate taboo no one is to speak of. Union is the word we dare not speak. Striketober inspiring the needed change.

         taboo numero 2

 

                       I’ve always thought it was unusual that in this country we find glory and patriotism in the killing of people. Yet one thing that makes America unique is the fact that more people from more different countries have arrived on these shores. So why kill people that are potential Americans? It’s unfortunate that patriotism requires us to enthusiastically hate our enemies, “Huns”, “krauts”, “nips”, “gooks” and now “Sand monkeys.”   Then we’re told the United States is slipping into third world conditions with our liberal educational system. Well, the truth is, thanks to unions, we have only emerged from our own third world working conditions since 1945. We started slipping back in the 80’s because most Republican jobs are low paying service industry jobs.                                                                     Civil rights advocates were abused and hassled and murdered.  I’m not seeing how going back to that era, the golden age of the 50’s, would be good. Those who fought for civil rights were brave patriots who were directly fighting for equality and their constitutional rights in their own country, and there was no lifetime military pension as incentive either. They fought for equality and what was right and they did it right here in this country.  Why are they not considered patriots?

            Boomers, stand up to this claim that we are a lazy and immoral generation. We have discarded a lot of unfair traditions of racism and sexism. It was the “greatest generation’ that left us with 10,000 years of nuclear contamination to store and 160 toxic nuclear sites and aging nuclear power plants that will need to be decommissioned at a zillion dollars apiece. It was the greatest generation that told black people to stand up and get out of “their” seat and supported segregation as it persisted through the sixties,mostly in the south, and they wistfully want to return to those days when men could beat their children and wives and there was nowhere for these victims to go. The boomers managed to change these cultural nightmares and it was the parents of the greatest generation that did the lion’s share of risky strikes, labor reform and unionization during the  30’s which shook the corporate world and finally gave American workers a good living and lifted us out of third world conditions.  Look up the Ludlow Massacre to get a feel for that era

 

In 1918, my grandmother was twelve years old and working 12 hours a day in a factory while the company big wigs were at the country club clipping fat cigars and drinking martinis. They laugh at the workers who have to beg to take a bathroom break. I remember the pain in her face as she recounted some of this type of corporate cruelty.  Imagine that a long time ago, in 1834, one of the first organized labor strikes occurred. What I read is that child laborers went on strike to lower the work week to six days and limiting the workday to 12 hours. You wonder how they got away with this.

                    Factories and many other large companies really treated workers poorly. Our American ancestors, endured difficult, torturous working conditions. Still today, so many employees are pushed beyond their endurance, but they keep going and going. Have you ever seen a 7-11 at lunch hour when there is only one employee? This cannot be the life the Creator intended and it’s very sad that so many people freely give their lives to enrich the few unworthy ones.                                          There’s no denying the extreme bravery of those in a war zone. But I ask myself, was it our victory in World War 1 (1914-1919) over the “Huns” that improved working conditions for my grandmother? NO! The child labor laws enacted during the Progressive Era and their enforcement as years went on was how her life improved; these labor reformers are the patriots to me. Fighting the corporations and eventually all this reform paid off with the prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s which the “greatest generation” primarily enjoyed!  

               Other examples of true patriots…..how about the suffragettes? For over fifty years they endured the criticisms and efforts to thwart them. But of course they were right; half the countries population was finally given a voice in 1920. Till then women were not allowed to vote. Talk about third world conditions!

           Of course, we have advanced a lot further than many countries, like China, whose tyrannical communists have conceded only one reform to labor activists.  Women are now allowed a 15 minute break to give birth. Then it’s back to work making “happy meal” toys for McDonalds.      

               I’m saying military service shouldn’t be the keystone to patriotism. What about the 250 million Americans that have never been in the military? Why do veterans have a lock on patriotism and now they are SUPER CITIZENS!   

        This is the military taboo we are not to speak of.  Taboo Numero 2. The working people of the world need to find dignity and fair pay on a planet wide basis as the main priority of our societies and dismantle the system that supports the warrior elite, corporate fascists and weapon manufacturers that continue to steer us away  from the peaceful and sustainable world that is our birthright. 
            

V2R

 

Green and Black baby

SECTION TWO    

UNITED SCAPES